Dynamic slicing in the presence of unconstrained pointers.pdfVIP

Dynamic Slicing in the Presence of Unconstrained Pointers  Technical Rep ort SER C-TR-93-P Hiralal Agra wal Richard A. DeMillo Eugene H. Spaord Software Engineering Research Center Department of Computer Sciences Purdue University W. Lafayette, IN 47907{200 4 debug@cs.purdue.edu Abstract Program slices are useful in debugging. Most work on program slicing to date has concen- trated on nding slices of programs involving only scalar variables. Pointers and comp osite variables do not lend themselves well to static analysis, esp ecially when the language involved is not strongly-typ ed. When debugging a program, however, we are interested in analyzing the program b ehavior for testcases that reveal a fault. In this pap er, we present a uniform approach to handling p ointers and comp osite variables such as arrays, records, and unions for the purp ose of obtaining dynamic program slices. The dynamic approach prop osed works well even when the language involved allows unconstrained p ointers and p erforms no runtime checks, as in C. 1 Intro duction The notion of program slicing has b een discussed extensively in the literature [20 , 17, 12, 13, 5]. This discussion, however, has mostly dealt with nding slices for programs involving scalar variables (see Section 6, Related Work). Slicing would b e even more useful in debu