Reasoning about Aliasing

. Object-oriented systems are typically structured as complex networks of interacting mutable objects. To reason about such systems, simple and efficient techniques for coping with aliasing are needed. This paper identifies several key criteria for evaluating techniques for reasoning about aliasing, then proposes a technique which satisfies these criteria. The proposed technique is a simple extension of the traditional local store technique for modelling pointers. The increasing popularity of the object-oriented style of programming has resulted in a renewed interest in reasoning about aliasing. Aliasing is common in object-oriented systems, because they are typically structured as complex networks of interacting mutable objects. Simple and efficient techniques for coping with aliasing are a pre-requisite to reasoning effectively about the behaviour of such systems. Techniques for reasoning about aliasing within data structures and aliasing between program variables were thoroughly res..