Interprocedural analysis for program comprehension by specialization

We report on an approach for program comprehension during large-scale maintenance of Fortran application programs. We have adapted partial evaluation (or specialization of programs given specific values for their input data) techniques for program comprehension. We focus on the automatic interprocedural analysis and we describe how we have specified, implemented in a tool, and used that analysis to improve program comprehension. The difficulty of that analysis is due to the lack of well defined interprocedural mechanisms and the complexity of visibility rules in Fortran.

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