Static slicing in the presence of goto statements

Abstract

A static program slice is an extract of a program which can help our understanding of the behavior of the program; it has been proposed for use in debugging, optimization, parallelization, and integration of programs. This article considers two types of static slices: executable and nonexecutable. Efficient and well-founded methods have been developed to construct executable slices for programs without goto statements; it would be tempting to assume these methods would apply as well in programs with arbitrary goto statements. We show why previous methods do not work in this more general setting, and describe our solutions that correctly and efficiently compute executable slices for programs even with arbitrary goto statements. Our conclusion is that goto statements can be accommodated in generating executable static slices.