Reachability analysis for annotated code

Abstract

Well-specified programs enable code reuse and therefore techniques that help programmers to annotate code correctly are valuable. We devised an automated analysis that detects unreachable code in the presence of code annotations. We implemented it as an enhancement of the extended static checker ESC/Java2 where it serves as a check of coherency of specifications and code. In this article we define the notion of semantic unreachability, describe an algorithm for checking it and demonstrate on a case study that it detects a class of errors previously undetected, as well as describe different scenarios of these errors.