Characterising, Explaining, and Exploiting the Approximate Nature of Static Analysis through Animation

This paper addresses the question: "How can animated visualisation be used to express interesting properties of static analysis?" The particular focus is upon static dependence analysis, but the approach adopted in the paper is applicable to other forms of static analysis. The challenge is twofold. First, there is the inherent difficultly of using animation, which is inherently dynamic, as a representation of static analysis, which is not. The paper shows one way in which this apparent contradiction can be overcome. Second, there is the harder challenge of ensuring that the animations so-produced correspond to features of genuine interest in the source code that are hard to visualize without animation. To address these two challenges the paper shows how properties of static dependence analysis can be formulated in a manner suitable for animated visualisation. These formulations of dependence have been implemented and the results used to provide dependence visualisations of the structure of a set of C programs. All animations described in the paper are also viewable on-line.