Modular Monadic Slicing in the Presence of Pointers

Program slicing is a family of program decomposition techniques. For traditional slicing methods lack modularity and flexibility, we have proposed a new formal method for program slicing—modular monadic slicing. This paper presents an approach to extend the modular monadic slicing for handling pointers. With the inspiration of forward program slicing, our approach obtains the point-to information through the data-flow iteration. By combining the forward monad slicing with data-flow iteration, our method computes the point-to information and slices the program in the same phase. So our approach has the same precision as traditional data-flow iteration methods, but needs less space. In addition, our approach also inherits the properties of language independence and reusability from the original monadic slicing method.