[$LIST] PL practice talk, Wed 2:30pm

[Suan Yong <suan@cs.wisc.edu>]

Hi all,

I'm giving a practice talk tomorrow:

  Wednesday, 28 July 2004
  2:30pm
  2310 CS

Cookies will be provided.
Abstract is given below.
Your attendance and feedback would be appreciated.

Suan

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Pointer Range Analysis.

Suan Yong and Susan Horwitz.
(To appear in Static Analysis Symposium, SAS'04)

Array-Range Analysis computes at compile time the
range of possible index values for each array-index
expression in a program. This information can be
used to detect potential out-of-bounds array accesses
and to identify non-aliasing array accesses. In a
language like C, where arrays can be accessed
indirectly via pointers, and where pointer arithmetic
is allowed, range analysis must be extended to compute
the range of possible values for each pointer dereference.

This paper describes a Pointer-Range Analysis algorithm
that computes a safe approximation of the set of memory
locations that may be accessed by each pointer dereference.
To properly account for non-trivial aspects of C,
including pointer arithmetic and type-casting, a range
representation is described that separates the identity
of a pointer's target location from its type; this
separation allows a concise representation of pointers
to multiple arrays, and precise handling of mismatched-
type pointer arithmetic.

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