The influence of language semantics on program slices

The authors present observations on the influence of language semantics on program slices. These observations serve to illustrate that, whenever a program slice is designed for a specific language, the semantic features should be carefully examined, and the corresponding slicing algorithm adjusted accordingly. The authors can show that it is impossible to develop a single slicing routine which can be applied to all programming languages. In other words, a program slicer should be language-dependent. Its algorithm should be flexible enough to correspond to the semantics of a given language.<>