A Denotational Interprocedural Program Slicer

This paper extends a previously developed intraprocedural denotational program slicer to handle procedures. Using the denotational approach, slices can be defined in terms of the abstract syntax of the object language without the need of a control flow graph or similar intermediate structure.

The algorithm presented here is capable of correctly handling the interplay between function and procedure calls, side-effects, and short-circuit expression evaluation.

The ability to deal with these features is required in reverse engineering of legacy systems, where code often contains side-effects.