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Computation of Interprocedural Control Dependencies

Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

March 1998, pp. 11-20

Mary Jean Harrold, Gregg Rothermel, and Saurabh Sinha

Abstract

Program dependence information is useful for a variety of software testing and maintenance tasks. Properly defined, control and data dependencies can be used to identify semantic dependencies. %guide the identification of semantic dependencies. %serve as a guide in identifying semantic dependencies. To function effectively on whole programs, tools that utilize dependence information require information about interprocedural dependencies: dependencies %that exist due to interactions between procedures. that exist because of interactions among procedures. Many techniques for computing data and control dependencies exist; however, in our search of the literature we find only one attempt to define and compute interprocedural control dependencies. Unfortunately, that approach can omit important control dependencies, and incorrectly identifies control dependencies for a large class of programs. This paper presents a definition of interprocedural control dependence that supports the relationship of control and data dependence to semantic dependence, an efficient algorithm for calculate interprocedural control dependencies, and empirical results obtained by our implementation of the algorithm.


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