ON THE COMPLEXITY OF DATA-FLOW ANALYSIS OF LOGIC PROGRAMS

It is widely held that there is a correlation between complexity and precision in dataflow analysis, in the sense that the more precise an analysis algorithm, the more computationally expensive it must be. The details of this correspondence, however, appear to not have been explored extensively. This paper reports some results on this tradeoff in the context of Horn logic programs. A formal notion of the ''precision'' of an analysis algorithm is proposed, and this is used to characterize the worst case computational complexity of a number of dataflow analysis algorithms with different degrees of precision.