An approach of monadic slicing for interprocedural programs

Program slicing is a technique for simplifying programs by focusing on selected aspects of semantics. This paper extends our previously presented intraprocedural monadic slicing to handle procedures. It presents backfilling labels based monadic approach to compute static slices of a program with call-by-value-result procedures. It first uses some given labels to initialize the monadic slices of the corresponding formal parameters at the beginning of a procedure; then analyzes this procedure through intraprocedural monadic slicing methods, whose slice result can be used to obtain the dependences among the parameters. It lastly obtains the final slice tables by backfilling the corresponding given labels. The algorithms in this paper make the best of the slice result from intraprocedural monadic slicing algorithms, without the need of a characteristic graph, a system dependence graph, or similar intermediate structure. They can also address calling-context problem through the dependence relations among the corresponding parameters. Furthermore, they reserve the excellent properties of compositionality and language-flexibility from intraprocedural monadic slicing algorithms.