This paper studies mathematically some special kinds of transfinite trace semantics and investigates program slicing w.r.t. these semantics. Several general facts about slicing, which hold for a wide class of programming languages and their transfinite semantics, are proven. The principal part of the work is done on control flow graphs keeping the treatment abstracted from any concrete programm...

Received Jun 12 th , 2015 Revised Aug 20 th , 2015 Accepted Aug 26 th , 2015 Slicing is used for program analysis. It the process of extracting the statements of a program that are relevant to a given computation. Static slicing generates slices for all possible execution of a program helping in program understanding, verification, and maintenance and testing. Dynamic slices are smaller in size...

A program schema defines a class of programs, all of which have identical statement structure, but whose functions and predicates may differ. A schema thus defines an entire class of programs according to how its symbols are interpreted. A subschema of a schema is obtained from a schema by deleting some of its statements. We prove that given a schema S which is predicate-linear, free and libera...

Mark Weiser’s observation that “programmers use slices when debugging”, back in 1982, started a new field of research. Program slicing, the study of meaningful subprograms that capture a subset of an existing program’s behaviour, aims at providing programmers with tools to assist in a variety of software development and maintenance activities. Two decades later, the work leading to this thesis ...

Different program slicing methods are used for debugging, testing, reverse engineering and maintenance. Slicing algorithms can be classified as a static slicing or dynamic slicing type. In applications such as debugging the computation of dynamic slices is more preferable since it can produce more precise results. In a recent paper [5] a new so-called “forward computed dynamic slice” algorithm ...

Trace slicing is a transformation technique that reduces the size of execution traces for the purpose of program analysis and debugging. Based on the appropriate use of antecedents, trace slicing tracks back reverse dependences and causality along execution traces and then cuts off irrelevant information that does not influence the data observed from the trace. In this paper, we describe the fi...

The emphasis on code re-usability in component-based software development has resulted in degradation of system performance. Component specialization techniques have been proposed to overcome this problem. They mainly specialize components wrt contents of component interfaces. This requires specialization to be performed in either a forward or backward direction. The current state of the art ap...

A formal executable semantics of a programming language has the necessary information to develop program debugging and reasoning techniques. In this paper we choose such a particular technique called program slicing and we introduce a generic algorithm which extracts a set of side-effects inducing constructs, directly from the formal executable semantics of a programming language. These constru...

Regarding the progress made in model analysis, more complex models, and consequently more complex programs can now be analyzed. However, this remains a difficult task in particular for concurrent programs which induce a lot of combinatory. Another way to reduce this complexity is to use program decomposition. Program decomposition technics extract a part of a given program while preserving the ...