A Program Slicer Using Def-Slice-Use Tables for Efficiently Slicing Both User-Defined and Library Functions

Program slicing is a technique for statically analyzing a program and extracting an executable sub-program, which is called a program slice, from the original program. This technique has been widely applied to program testing, debugging and maintenance. This paper presents a slicing method for extracting program slices from a program that calls library functions, which are provided as object code. The method this paper presents analyzes dependence relationships between library functions using global data that are referred to by the library functions but not explicitly declared in a program. In this method, before slicing a program with respect to a slicing criterion, a DefSlice-Use table will be generated that stores slice information for each function in the program by slicing these functions in advance, and then the program can be efficiently sliced using this table. The paper also illustrates some examples of program slicing using a program slicer LibSlicer that implements this method. key words: control dependence, data dependence, library function, program dependence graph, program slice