Program analysis using weighted pushdown systems

  • Authors:
  • Thomas Reps;Akash Lal;Nick Kidd

  • Affiliations:
  • Comp. Sci. Dept., University of Wisconsin;Comp. Sci. Dept., University of Wisconsin;Comp. Sci. Dept., University of Wisconsin

  • Venue:
  • FSTTCS'07 Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Foundations of software technology and theoretical computer science
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Pushdown systems (PDSs) are an automata-theoretic formalism for specifying a class of infinite-state transition systems. Infiniteness comes from the fact that each configuration 〈p,S〉 in the state space consists of a (formal) "control location" p coupled with a stack S of unbounded size. PDSs can model program paths that have matching calls and returns, and automaton-based representations allow analysis algorithms to account for the infinite control state space of recursive programs. Weighted pushdown systems (WPDSs) are a generalization of PDSs that add a general "black-box" abstraction for program data (through weights). WPDSs also generalize other frameworks for interprocedural analysis, such as the Sharir-Pnueli functional approach. This paper surveys recent work in this area, and establishes a few new connections with existing work.