Program slicing: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 12:14, 9 November 2008

Revision as of 00:43, 26 February 2009

Line 1:

{{Otheruses4|program slicing|other uses of slicing|Slicing}}

In [[computer programming]], '''program slicing''' is the computation of a program slice. The '''program slice''' consists of the parts of a program that may affect the values computed at some point of interest, referred to as a '''slicing criterion'''. Program slicing can be used in [[debugging]] to locate more easily source of errors. Other applications of slicing include [[software maintenance]], [[Optimization (computer science)|optimization]], and [[Program analysis (computer science)|program analysis]].

Slicing techniques has been knowing a rapid development since the original definition of [[Mark Weiser]]. At first, the slicing was only static, i.e. applied on the source code with no other information than the source code. [[Bogdan Korel]] and [[Janusz Laski]] introduced ''dynamic slicing'' which works on a specific execution of the program (for a given execution trace). Other forms of slicing exist, for instance path slicing.