Parametrizing Program Analysis by Lifting to Cardinal Power Domains

A parametric analysis is an analysis whose input and output are parametrized with a number of parameters which can be instantiated to abstract properties after analysis is completed. This paper proposes to use Cousot and Cousot’s Cardinal power domain to capture functional dependencies of analysis output on its input and obtain a parametric analysis by parametrizing a non-parametric base analysis. We illustrate the method by parametrizing a Pos based groundness analysis of logic programs to a parametric groundness analysis. In addition, a prototype implementation shows that generality of the parametric groundness analysis comes with a negligible extra cost.