Interconvertibility of Set Constraints and Context-Free Language Reachability (1996)
| Venue: | In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation |
| Citations: | 26 - 1 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Melski96interconvertibilityof,
author = {David Melski and Thomas Reps},
title = {Interconvertibility of Set Constraints and Context-Free Language Reachability},
booktitle = {In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation},
year = {1996},
pages = {74--89},
publisher = {ACM Press}
}
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Abstract
We show the interconvertibility of context-free-language reachability problems and a class of set-constraint problems: given a context-free-language reachability problem, we show how to construct a set-constraint problem whose answer gives a solution to the reachability problem; given a set-constraint problem, we show how to construct a contextfree-language reachability problem whose answer gives a solution to the set-constraint problem. The interconvertibility of these two formalisms offers an conceptual advantage akin to the advantage gained from the interconvertibility of finite-state automata and regular expressions in formal language theory, namely, a problem can be formulated in whichever formalism is most natural. It also offers some insight into the "O(n³) bottleneck" for different types of program-analysis problems, and allows results previously obtained for context-free-language reachability problems to be applied to set-constraint problems.
