Program specialization via program slicing

Abstract

This paper concerns the use of program slicing to perform a certain kind of program-specialization operation. We show that the specialization operation that slicing performs is different from the specialization operations performed by algorithms for partial evaluation, supercompilation, bifurcation, and deforestation. To study the relationship between slicing and these operations in a simplified setting, we consider the problem of slicing functional programs. We identify two different goals for what we mean by “slicing a functional program” and give algorithms that correspond to each of them