An abstract domain to infer types over zones in spreadsheets

  • Authors:

  • Tie Cheng;Xavier Rival

  • Affiliations:

  • École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France,INRIA Paris---Rocquencourt, France,École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France;École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France,INRIA Paris---Rocquencourt, France

  • Venue:
  • SAS'12 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Static Analysis
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Spreadsheet languages are very commonly used, by large user bases, yet they are error prone. However, many semantic issues and errors could be avoided by enforcing a stricter type discipline. As declaring and specifying type information would represent a prohibitive amount of work for users, we propose an abstract interpretation based static analysis for spreadsheet programs that infers type constraints over zones of spreadsheets, viewed as two-dimensional arrays. Our abstract domain consists in a cardinal power from a numerical abstraction describing zones in a spreadsheet to an abstraction of cell values, including type properties. We formalize this abstract domain and its operators (transfer functions, join, widening and reduction) as well as a static analysis for a simplified spreadsheet language. Last, we propose a representation for abstract values and present an implementation of our analysis.