Abstract
In this work, we introduce slicing for Abstract State Machines (ASMs). The idea of this concept is analogous to the one of program slicing which is an established technique for extracting statements from a program that are relevant for its behaviour at a given point of interest. These statements form again a syntactically correct program called a slice. Previous work has focused on programming languages that differ substantially from ASMs. Although the concept of program slicing does not directly extend to ASMs, it is possible to find an analogous concept for ASMs. We present such an approach.
In spite of the fact that a minimal slice is not computable in the general case, we identify an expressive class of ASMs for which a minimal (static) slice is computable (and prove the computability). This basic result can be extended in several ways. We present some extensions to larger classes of ASMs and other variants for the notion of slicing.
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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Nowack, A. (2004). Slicing Abstract State Machines. In: Zimmermann, W., Thalheim, B. (eds) Abstract State Machines 2004. Advances in Theory and Practice. ASM 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3052. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24773-9_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24773-9_14
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-22094-7
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