A static slicing method for functional programs and its incremental version

Abstract

An effective static slicing technique for functional programs must have two features. Its handling of function calls must be context sensitive without being inefficient, and, because of the widespread use of algebraic datatypes, it must take into account structure transmitted dependences. It has been shown that any analysis that combines these two characteristics is undecidable, and existing slicing methods drop one or the other. We propose a slicing method that only weakens (and not entirely drop) the requirement of context-sensitivity and that too for some and not all programs.