Binding-time analysis and the taming of C pointers
Lars Ole Andersen · 1993
The aim of binding-time analysis is to determine when variables, expressions, statements, etc. in a program can be evaluated by classifying these into static (compile-time) and dynamic (run-time). Explicit separation of binding times has turned out to be crucial for successful self-application of partial evaluators, and apparently, it is also an important stepping-stone for profitable specialization of imperative languages with pointers and dynamic memory allocation. In this paper we present an automatic binding-time analysis for a substantial subset of the C language.