Dynamic slicing: a generic analysis based on a natural semantics format

Slicing analyses have been proposed for different programming languages. Rather than defining a new analysis from scratch for each programming language, we would like to specify such an analysis once and for all, in a language-independent way, and then specialize it for different programming languages. In order to achieve this goal, we propose a notion of natural semantics format and a dynamic slicing analysis format. The natural semantics format formalizes a class of natural semantics and the analysis format is a generic, language-independent, slicing analysis. The correctness of the generic analysis is established as a relation between the derivation trees of the original program and the slice. This generic analysis is then instantiated to several programming languages conforming to the semantics format (an imperative language, a logic programming language and a functional language), yielding a dynamic slicing analyzer for each of these languages.