Role analysis

Abstract

We present a new role system in which the type (or role) of each object depends on its referencing relationships with other objects, with the role changing as these relationships change. Roles capture important object and data structure properties and provide useful information about how the actions of the program interact with these properties. Our role system enables the programmer to specify the legal aliasing relationships that define the set of roles that objects may play, the roles of procedure parameters and object fields, and the role changes that procedures perform while manipulating objects. We present an interprocedural, compositional, and context-sensitive role analysis algorithm that verifies that a program maintains role constraints.