Parametrizing Program Analysis

Abstract

A parametric analysis is an analysis whose input and output are parametrized with a number of parameters which can be instantiated to abstract properties after analysis is completed. We use Cousot and Cousot's Cardinal power domain to capture dependencies of analysis output on its input and present a method for obtaining parametric analyses from non-parametric base analyses. We apply the method to parametrize POS-based groundness dependency and set sharing analyses of logic programs. Experiments with a prototype analyzer shows that generality of the two resulting parametric analyses comes with a small extra cost.