Dynamic Dependence in Term rewriting Systems and its Application to Program Slicing

Abstract. Program slicing is a useful technique for debugging, testing, and analyzing programs. A program slice consists of the parts of a program which (potentially) affect the values computed at some point of interest. With rare exceptions, program slices have hitherto been computed and defined in ad-hoc and language-specific ways. The principal contribution of this paper is to show that general and semantically well-founded notions of slicing and dependence can be derived in a simple, uniform way from term rewriting systems (TRSs). Our slicing technique is applicable to any language whose semantics is specified in TRS form. Moreover, we show that our method admits an efficient implementation.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: PLILP
• Authors: John Field, Frank Tip
• Keywords: Automated Reasoning, PLILP 1994, Program Slices, Program Slicing, Useful Technique