A combined representation for the maintenance of C programs

Abstract

An important aid to the problems of program comprehension has been the use of static analysis tools to provide useful and up to date information on a program. Through the use of different views a maintainer can gain a much clearer understanding of a program. A drawback of static analysis tools is that various representations of the code are required to construct the different views of the program. A solution is to devise a single combined representation containing sufficient information to allow construction of each required view. The paper describes research to extend an existing unified interprocedural graph to allow the representation of C programs. Techniques for the dependence analysis of pointer variables are described and the construction of interprocedural definition-use information in the presence of pointer parameters addressed. A fine grained program representation, the Combined C Graph (CCG), containing three new edge types is introduced.<>