Speeding up slicing

Program slicing is a fundamental operation for many soft-ware engineering tools. Currently, the most efficient algo-rithm for interprocedural slicing is one that uses a program representation called the system dependence graph. This paper defines a new algorithm for slicing with system dependence graphs that is asymptotically faster than the pre-vious one. A preliminary experimental study indicates that the new algorithm is also significantly faster in practice, pro-viding roughly a 6-fold speedup on examples of 348 to 757 lines