In the last years, the concern with the correctness of programs has been leading programmers to enrich their programs with annotations following the principles of design-by-contract, in order to be able to guarantee their correct behaviour and to facilitate reuse of verified components without having to reconstruct proofs of correctness. In this paper we adapt the idea of specification-based sl...

Program slicing is an important operation that can be used as the basis for programming tools that help programmers understand, debug, maintain, and test their code. This paper extends previous work on program slicing by providing a new definition of “correct” slices, by introducing a representation for C-style switch statements, and by defining a new way to compute control dependences and to s...

This paper reports on the development of specific slicing techniques for functional programs and their use for the identification of possible coherent components from monolithic code. An associated tool is also introduced. This piece of research is part of a broader project on program understanding and re-engineering of legacy code supported by formal methods.

Encoding knowledge is time consuming and expensive. A possible solution to reduce the cost of developing a new knowledge base (KB) is to reuse existing knowledge. Previous work addressing this problem has focused on standards for representing, exchanging, and accessing knowledge (Genesereth and Fikes 1992), (Chaudhri et al. 1998), and on creating large repositories of knowledge (Lenat and Guha ...

Static program slicing has been used effectively for a variety of applications ranging from debugging to program integration to software re-engineering. A program slice consists of the parts of a program that may affect or are affected by the value being computed at the point of interest. A slice, for sequential programs, is computed by examining control and data dependence in the program. Rece...

Program slicing restricts attention the components of a program relevant to evaluation of one expression, the slicing criterion. Our slicer, which explicitly represents the store as an aggregate value is the rst to support arbitrary pointer manipulations and aggregate values, and is faster than more limited techniques. We also improve the asymptotic complexity of slicing in the presence of proc...

We show how to combine program slicing and constraint solving in order to obtain better slice accuracy. The method is used in the VALSOFT slicing system. One particular application is the validation of computer-controlled measurement systems. VALSOFT will be used by the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt for verification of legally required calibration standards. The article describes the VA...

Object-oriented programming has been considered a most promising method in program development and maintenance. An important feature of object-oriented programs (OOPs) is their reusability which can be achieved through the inheritance of classes or reusable components.Dynamic program slicing is an effective technique for narrowing the errors to the relevant parts of a program when debugging. Gi...

This paper presents a theory of dynamic slicing, which reveals that the relationship between static and dynamic slicing is more subtle than previously thought. The definitions of dynamic slicing are formulated in terms of the projection theory of slicing. This shows that existing forms of dynamic slicing contain three orthogonal dimensions in their slicing criteria and allows for a lattice-theo...