A Program Slicing for Object-Oriented Programs

Abstract

A slice of a program consists of those statements and predicates in that program that may affect, directly or indirectly, the values of certain variables at certain points in the program. Program slicing has been used in program understanding, testing, debugging, software reuse, and program integration. Little has been reported on program optimization by program slicing. We designed and built a program-slicing system as a source code optimizer for object-oriented programs. It can eliminate redundant classes, procedures, variables, and even statements in an object-oriented program.