Slicing programs with arbitrary control

Program slicing is a program transformation that is useful in program debugging, program maintenance, and other applications that involve understanding program behavior. Given a program point p and a set of vari-ables V, the goal of slicing is to create a projection of the program (by eliminating some statements), such that the projection and the original program compute the same values for all variables in V at point p. This paper addresses the problem of slicing programs with arbitrary control flow. Previous slicing algo-rithms do not always form semantically correct program projections when applied to such programs. We present an algorithm for slicing programs with complex control flow and a proof of its correctness. Our algo-rithm works for programs with completely arbitrary control flow, including irreducible control flow. 1