Forward Slicing by Conjunctive Partial Deduction and Argument Filtering

Leuschel, M. and Vidal, G. (2005) Forward Slicing by Conjunctive Partial Deduction and Argument Filtering. In: European Symposium on Programming (ESOP'05), April 2005, Edinburgh, UK. pp. 61-76.

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Abstract

Program slicing is a well-known methodology that aims at identifying
the program statements that (potentially) affect the values computed
at some point of interest. Within
imperative programming, this technique has been successfully applied
to debugging, specialization, merging, reuse, maintenance, etc. Due
to its declarative nature, adapting the slicing notions and
techniques to a logic programming setting is not an easy task. In
this work, we define the first, semantics-preserving, forward
slicing technique for logic programs. Our approach relies on the
application of a conjunctive partial deduction algorithm for a precise
propagation of information between calls.
We do not
distinguish between static and dynamic slicing since partial
deduction can naturally deal with both static and dynamic data.
Furthermore, this approach can quite easily
be implemented by
adding a new code generator on top of existing partial
deduction systems. A slicing tool has been implemented in
ECCE, where a post-processing transformation to remove redundant
arguments has been added. Experiments conducted on a wide variety
of programs are encouraging and demonstrate the usefulness of our
approach, both as a classical slicing method and as a technique
for code size reduction.