PRACTICAL PROGRAM ANALYSIS USING GENERAL-PURPOSE LOGIC PROGRAMMING SYSTEMS - A CASE-STUDY

Many analysis problems can be cast in the form of evaluating minimal m odels of a logic program. Although such formulations are appealing due to their simplicity and declarativeness, they have not been widely us ed in practice because, either existing logic programming systems do n ot guarantee completeness, or those that do have been viewed as too in efficient for integration into a compiler. The objective of this paper is to re-examine this issue in the context of recent advances in impl ementation technologies of logic programming systems. We find that suc h declarative formulations can indeed be used in practical systems, wh en combined with the appropriate tool for evaluation. We use existing formulations of analysis problems - groundness analysis of logic progr ams, and strictness analysis of functional programs - in this case stu dy, and the XSB system, a table-based logic programming system, as the evaluation tool of choice. We give experimental evidence that the res ultant groundness and strictness analysis systems are practical in ter ms of both time and space. In terms of implementation effort, the anal yzers took less than 2 man-weeks (in total), to develop, optimize and evaluate. The analyzer itself consists of about 100 lines of tabled Pr olog code and the entire system, including the components to read and preprocess input programs and to collect the analysis results, consist s of about 500 lines of code.