Pointer-induced aliasing: a problem taxonomy

Abstract

A?iasing occurs at some program point during execution when two or more names exist for the same location. We have isolated various programming language mechanisms which create aliases. We have classified the complexity of the fllas problem induced by each mechanism alone and in combination, as AfP-hard, complement tip-hard, or polynomial (’P). We present our problem classification, give an overview of our proof that finding interprocedural aliases in the presence of single level pointers is in 7, and present a represent tive proof for the NP-hard problems.