Differential methods in logic program analysis

Abstract

Program analysis based on abstract interpretation has proven very useful in compilation of constraint and logic programming languages. Unfortunately, the traditional goal-dependent framework is inherently imprecise. This is because it handles call and return in such a way that dataflow information may be re-asserted unnecessarily, leading to a loss of precision for many description domains. For a few specific domains, the literature contains proposals to overcome the problem, and some implementations use various unpublished tricks that sometimes avoid the precision loss. The purpose of this paper is to map the landscape of goal-dependent, goal-independent, and combined approaches to generic ..