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Control-flow analysis

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 188.27.81.64 (talk) at 22:12, 20 July 2014 (soooo... if this is talking about inter-procedural analysys, aren't you forgetting that you can call stuff through pointers?? Is pointer analysis a trivial problem?). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

In computer science, control flow analysis is a static code analysis technique for determining the control flow of a program. The control flow is expressed as a control flow graph (CFG). The term "control flow analysis" was introduced independently by Neil D. Jones[1] and Olin Shivers.[2][non-primary source needed] For both functional programming languages and object-oriented programming languages, the term CFA, and elaborations such as k-CFA, refer to specific algorithms that compute control flow.[dubious – discuss]

For many imperative programming languages, the control flow[which?] of a program is explicit in a program's source code.[dubious – discuss] As a result, interprocedural control-flow analysis implicitly usually refers to a static analysis technique for determining the receiver(s) of function or method calls in computer programs written in a higher-order programming language. For example, in a programming language with higher-order functions like Scheme, the target of a function call may not be explicit: in the isolated expression 

(lambda (f) (f x))

it is unclear to which procedure f may refer. To determine the possible targets, a control-flow analysis must consider where this expression could be invoked, and what argument it may receive.

Techniques such as abstract interpretation, constraint solving and type systems may be used to compute control-flow analysis.[3][dubious – discuss]

See also

References

  1. ^ Neil D. Jones (1981), "Flow analysis of lambda expressions", Automata, Languages and Programming: 114–128, doi:10.1007/3-540-10843-2_10
  2. ^ Shivers, Olin (1988), "Control-flow analysis in Scheme", Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN'88 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), SIGPLAN Notices, Vol.23, No.7: 164–174, doi:10.1145/53990.54007
  3. ^ Flemming Nielson, Hanne Riis Nielson & Chris Hankin (1999). Principles of Program Analysis. Springer.
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