On the Complexity of
Dataflow Analysis of Logic Programs
Saumya Debray
Department of Computer Science
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721, U.S.A.
Abstract
It is widely held that there is a correlation between complexity and
precision in dataflow analysis, in the sense that the more precise an
analysis algorithm, the more computationally expensive it must be. The
details of this relationship, however, appear to not have been explored
extensively. This article reports some results on this correlation in the
context of logic programs. A formal notion of the ``precision'' of an
analysis algorithm is proposed, and this is used to characterize the
worst-case computational complexity of a number of dataflow analyses with
different degrees of precision. While this article considers the analysis of
logic programs, the technique proposed, namely the use of ``exactness
sets'' to study relationships between complexity and precision of analyses,
is not specific to logic programming in any way, and is equally applicable
to flow analyses of other language families.