Towards a Formal Semantics-Based Technique for Interprocedural Slicing

Abstract

Interprocedural slicing is a technique applied on programs with procedures which relies on how the information is passed at procedure call/return sites. Such a technique computes program slices (i.e. program fragments restricted w.r.t. a given criterion). The existing approaches to interprocedural slicing exploit the particularities of the underlying language semantics in order to compute program slices. In this paper we propose a generic technique for interprocedural slicing. More specifically, our approach works with inferred particularities of a language semantics, given as a rewriting-logic specification, and computes program slices using a term slicing-based algorithm.