Application of formal methods to the development of a software maintenance tool

Partial evaluation is a technique traditionally used in compilation. We have adapted this technique to the undestanding of scientific application programs during their maintenance and we have implemented a tool. This tool analyzes Fortran 90 programs and performs an interprocedural pointer analysis. This paper presents how we have specified this analysis with different formalisms (inference rules with global definitions and set and relational operators). Then we present the tool implementing these specifications. It has been implemented in a generic programming environment and a graphical inetrface has been developped to visualize the information computed during the partial evaluation

An automatic interprocedural analysis for the understanding of scientific application programs

International audienceThis paper reports on an approach for improving the understanding of old programs which have become very complex due to numerous extensions. We have adapted partial evaluation techniques for program understanding. These techniques mainly use propagation through statements and simplifications of statements. We focus here on the automatic interprocedural analysis and we specify both tasks (propagation and simplification) for call-statements, in terms of inference rules with notations taken from the formal specification languages B and VDM. We describe how we have implemented that interprocedural analysis in a tool, and how it can be used to improve program understanding. The difficulty of that analysis is due to the lack of well defined interprocedural mechanisms and the complexity of visibility rules in Fortran