Aggregate structure identification and its application to program analysis
US6279149A · kind A · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Sep 24, 1998 |
| Grant date | Aug 21, 2001 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Sep 24, 2018 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG06F8/75
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
An efficient program analysis method is provided for lazily decomposing aggregates (such as records and arrays) into simpler components based on the access patterns specific to a given program. This process allows us both to identify implicit aggregate structure not evident from declarative information in the program, and to simplify the representation of declared aggregates when references are made only to a subset of their components. The method can be exploited to yield: (i) a fast type analysis method applicable to program maintenance applications (such as date usage inference for the Year 2000 problem); and (ii) an efficient method for atomization of aggregates. More specifically, aggregate atomization decomposes all of the data that can be manipulated by the program into a set of disjoint atoms such that each data reference can be modeled as one or more references to atoms without loss of semantic information. Aggregate atomization can be used to adapt program analyses and representations designed for scalar data to aggregate data. In particular, atomization can be used to build more precise versions of program representations such as SSA form or PDGs. Such representations ca…
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.