In this paper, we study program transformations called uselesscode elimination and program slicing in the context of the π-calculus. The aim of useless-code elimination and program slicing is to simplify a program by eliminating useless or unimportant part of the program. We define formal correctness criteria for those transformations, present a type-based transformation method, and prove its c...

Static program slicing is a technique to detect the program parts (i.e. the “slice”) of the given program possibly affecting a given property. The technique is of interest for analysing safety-critical software, since it can identify the program parts that may affect various safety properties. Verification efforts can then be directed towards those parts, leading to a more efficient verificatio...

To understand the behavior of a program, developers often need to read source code fragments in various modules. Systemdependence-graph-based (SDG) program slicing is a good candidate for supporting the investigation of data-flow paths among modules, as SDG is capable of showing the data-dependence of focused program elements. However, this technique has two problems. First, constructing SDG re...

Program slicing is a method for decomposing programs by analyzing their data and control flow. It has many applications in the field of software engineering (like program debugging, testing, code reuse, maintenance, etc). The so called program dependence graph—a data structure that stores control and data dependences between the statements of imperative programs—is a key ingredient of many slic...

This paper outlines the concept of probabilistic program slicing. Whereas conventional slicing removes statements that cannot affect the slicing criterion, probabilistic slicing also removes statements that are unlikely to affect the criterion. The paper presents a simple example before describing some algorithmic concerns. Then three motivating applications are described. Finally it highlights...

Hardware description languages (HDLs) are used today to describe circuits at all levels. In large HDL programs, there is a need for source code reduction techniques to address a myriad of problems in formal verification, design, simulation, and testing. Program slicing is a static program analysis technique that allows an analyst to automatically extract portions of programs relevant to the asp...

Program slicing is the task of finding all statements in a program that directly or indirectly influence the value of a variable occurrence. The set of statements that can affect the value of a variable at some point in a program is called a program backward slice. In several software engineering applications, such as program debugging and measuring program cohesion and parallelism, several sli...

Slicing is a well-established program analysis technique that has applications in debugging, program understanding and model reduction. This paper presents an approach to slicing formal specifications based on communicating extended automata.

This paper extends the notion of slicing, which was originally proposed and studied for sequential programs, to concurrent programs and presents a graph-theoretical approach to slicing concurrent programs. In addition to the usual control and data dependences proposed and studied for sequential programs, the paper introduces three new types of primary program dependences in concurrent programs,...