Program Graphs and Execution Behavior

This paper describes a technique for predicting the execution behavior of a source program or a software design specification. As a by-product of syntactic analysis, a program graph is constructed which can subsequently be treated as the graph of a finite automaton. The expression for execution behavior is the regular expression of the graph. Several simplification techniques for these expressions are discussed and exemplified. In particular, the substitution of known values for program segments followed by constant folding cannot be done indiscriminately; the allowable situations are characterized. Applications include the prediction of execution time for a program or a software design, other forms of language analysis, and program restructuring.