Interprocedural slicing using dependence graphs

A slice of a program with respect to a program point p and variable x consists of all statements of the program that might affect the value of x at point p. This paper concerns the problem of interprocedural slicing — generating a slice of an entire program, where the slice crosses the boundaries of procedure calls. To solve this problem, we introduce a new kind of graph to represent programs, called a system dependence graph, which extends previous dependence representations to incorporate collections of procedures (with procedure calls) rather than just monolithic programs. Our main result is an algorithm for interprocedural slicing that uses the new representation.