Chopping: A Generalization of Slicing
Daniel Jackson, Eugene J. Rollins · 1994
A new method for extracting partial representations of a program is described. Given two sets of variable instances, source and sink, a graph is constructed showing the statements that cause definitions of source to affect uses of sink. This criterion can express a wider range of queries than the various forms of slice criteria, which it subsumes as special cases. On the standard slice criterion (backward slicing from a use or definition) it produces better results than existing algorithms. The method is modular. By treating all statements abstractly as def-use relations, it can present a procedure call as a simple statement, so that it appears in the graph as a single node whose role may be understood without looking beyond the context of the call