Conditioned program slicing

Slicing is a technique to decompose programs based on the analysis of the c ontrol and data flow. In the original Weiser's definition, a slice consists of any subset of program statements preserving the behaviour of the origin al program with respect to a program point and a subset of the program vari ables (slicing criterion), for any execution path. We present conditioned s licing, a general slicing model based on statement deletion. A conditioned slice consists of a subset of program statements which preserves the behavi our of the original program with respect to a slicing criterion for a given set of execution paths. The set of initial states of the program that char acterise these paths is specified in the form of a first order logic formul a on the input variables. We also show how slices deriving from other state ment deletion based slicing models can be defined as conditioned slices. Th is is used to formally define a partial ordering relation between slicing m odels and to build a classification framework. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B. V. All rights reserved.