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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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