A contribution to program comprehension by program analysis: application to numerical programs

This paper deals with non-functional aspects of software. It presents an approach towards the integration of methods in order to handle properties of numerical programs. We develop a program analysis technique which allows us to formalise, evaluate and check non-functional properties of programs. These property evaluations are used in two main areas. The first one is related to program design to choose data representations and to perform program transformations. The second is related to reverse engineering, and particularly to software reuse and maintenance. As example, a functional language with numerical type only is considered, and the accuracy of the numerical computations is the considered non-functional property.