Applying answer set programming to points-to analysis of object-oriented language

Abstract

Points-to information is essential in software engineering, including compiler optimization, instruction-level parallelism, program verification, and so on. The propagating of points-to information along paths of a program can be viewed as the "frame problem" in a dynamic world. As a primary knowledge representing and reasoning tool in Artificial Intelligence, Answer Set Programming (ASP) provides a natural and concise way to express the frame problem. We present a collection of ASP rules to model the propagating of points-to information along paths of an object-oriented program. With these rules and basic facts of a program, points-to information at each program point can be computed easily. This makes it possible to acquire useful information for program analysis through existing ASP solvers. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.