Forward slicing of functional logic programs by partial evaluation

Abstract

Program slicing has been mainly studied in the context of imperative languages, where it has been applied to a wide variety of software engineering tasks, like program understanding, maintenance, debugging, testing, code reuse, etc. This work introduces the first forward slicing technique for declarative multi-paradigm programs which integrate features from functional and logic programming. Basically, given a program and a slicing criterion (a function call in our setting), the computed forward slice contains those parts of the original program which are reachable from the slicing criterion. Our approach to program slicing is based on an extension of (online) partial evaluation. Therefore, it provides a simple way to develop program slicing tools from existing partial evaluators and helps to clarify the relation between both methodologies. A slicing tool for the multi-paradigm language Curry, which demonstrates the usefulness of our approach, has been implemented in Curry itself.

Una aproximación offline a la evaluación parcial dirigida por narrowing

“…Sus aplicaciones están relacionadas con la depuración, mantenimiento, prueba y reuso de código. En [Vid03,SV07] se introduce una técnica para obtener trozos de un programa a partir de un programa especializado mediante el esquema NPE. Posteriormente [OSV04a,OSV04c,OSV05] plantean una aproximación ligera de especialización en la que parten de una técnica de slicing 5 que les permite extraer trozos de un programa, a los que se les aplica una transformación para hacerlos ejecutables, y así, obtener un programa especializado.…”