Propagation

So this week was still filled with constant propagation techniques, but also with software metrics. I have given a presentation about functional software metrics which was based on this PhD thesis. It is very hard to find papers about software metrics for functional languages, but it is even harder to find them for scripting languages! Please let me know if you know a website that covers metrics specifically for scripting languages, I don't expect there to be any papers about this subject.

I am looking for software metrics for scripting languages because I think that metrics can help in finding the weak spots in a program, but there has to be evidence to support this. Validation of software metrics is rather time-consuming, so hopefully done by somebody else :) It shouldn't be hard to make a tool based on php-front to generate a rapport with software metrics about your program, any volunteers?

But back to the constant propagation. I have added support for the propagation within loop-constructs, if-statements and switch-statements. This was not very hard because I could use the techniques described in this paper. The construct that was not discusses in this paper, or on any slide of the pt course (which is not given anymore, unfortunately), is the if-elseif-else construct. It is not very hard to come up with the (hopefully correct) semantics for this, but I could be wrong of course. I will explain my interpretation in the next section, but it might be hard to follow. Feel free to ask for a better explanation!

The if-elseif-else construct is evaluated as a list of list of statements. The first statement is used as an unit-element in a foldr over this list. This foldr applies a given strategy to every element, which is to be expected. But it also performs an split-and-intersect of the dynamic-rule-set between every two elements. The result of this is that the rule-set will only contain the dynamic rules that are stable in all branches of the if-elseif-else statement. The implementation of the switch-construct was pretty easy after I made the infra-structure for this "split-and-intersect"-foldr.

So the constant propagation is coming along very fine and is also added to the php-sat-tool. The new flag --complex-inclusion triggers the tool to perform constant-propagation and include the files that can be included in that way. The constant propagation is not completely finished, to consider this an 'alpha-feature in this 'beta'-tool.