Computing amorphous program slices using dependence graphs

This paper presents an algorithm for computing amorphous program slices. Amorphous program slicing relaxes the syntactic condition of traditional slicing and can therefore produce considerably smaller slices. Existing algorithms slice the program’s control-flow graph and then apply a collection of axiomatic rules. A more unified approach is obtained using the sysrem dependence graph for both steps. Slicing this graph requires linear time. Furthermore, it contains sufficient information to allow the rules to be easily specified and applied. Some of these rules treat the system dependence graph as a data-flow graph and use a data-flow evaluation model, while others perform standard compiler optimizations. The application of amorphous slicing to the problem of determining array access safety is considered.