The Application of Term Rewriting Systems for Expressing Generic Program Slicing Algorithms

Program slicing is a technique in software engineering for isolating parts of a program that influence the value of a variable or some other arbitrary expression in that program. There exist many different slicing algorithms, with specific techniques for a variety of language features such as procedures, unstructured control flow, composite data types, pointers, concurrency, etc. This paper shows that it is possible to obtain more accurate and flexible generic slicing algorithms by specifying the semantics of programming languages as a term rewriting system. Changes to the behavior of the slicing algorithm can then be accomplished through simple changes in rewriting rules.