Amorphous program slicing

This paper introduces amorphous program slicing. Like traditional slicing, amorphous slicing simplifies a program while preserving a projection of its semantics. Unlike traditional slicing, amorphous slicing may make use of any simplifying transformation which preserves this semantic projection, thereby improving upon the simplification power of traditional slicing and consequently its applicability to program comprehension. The paper also introduces a theoretical framework of program projection. A projection is defined with respect to an equivalence relation on programs together with a simplicity measure (an ordering on programs). Having defined this framework, amorphous and traditional forms of static and conditioned slice are defined by instantiating the definition of a projection with different equivalence and ordering relations. The projection framework helps to contain the potential explosion in slicing paradigms and facilitates comparison across the boundaries of these paradigms.