2 research outputs found
Slicing functional programs by calculation
Program slicing is a well known family of techniques used to identify code fragments
which depend on or are depended upon specific program entities. They are particularly
useful in the areas of reverse engineering, program understanding, testing and software maintenance.
Most slicing methods, usually targeting either the imperative or the object oriented
paradigms, are based on some sort of graph structure representing program dependencies.
Slicing techniques amount, therefore, to (sophisticated) graph transversal algorithms.
This paper proposes a completely different approach to the slicing problem for functional
programs. Instead of extracting program information to build an underlying dependencies’
structure, we resort to standard program calculation strategies, based on the so-called Bird-
Meertens formalism. The slicing criterion is specified either as a projection or a hiding
function which, once composed with the original program, leads to the identification of the
intended slice. Going through a number of examples, the paper suggests this approach may
be an interesting, even if not completely general alternative to slicing functional program