The semantics of program dependence

  • Authors:
  • Robert Cartwright;Mattias Felleisen

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, TX;Department of Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, TX

  • Venue:
  • PLDI '89 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1989 Conference on Programming language design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 1989

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Abstract

Optimizing and parallelizing compilers for procedural languages rely on various forms of program dependence graphs (pdgs) to express the essential control and data dependencies among atomic program operations. In this paper, we provide a semantic justification for this practice by deriving two different forms of program dependence graph — the output pdg and the def-order pdg—and their semantic definitions from non-strict generalizations of the denotational semantics of the programming language. In the process, we demonstrate that both the output pdg and the def-order pdg (with minor technical modifications) are conventional data-flow programs. In addition, we show that the semantics of the def-order pdg dominates the semantics of the output pdg and that both of these semantics dominate—rather than preserve—the semantics of sequential execution.