Re: (COPY) compile-time taint checking and the halting problem

[David L. Nicol]

Steve Fink wrote:

> It's standard semantic analysis. Both your taintedness analysis and my
> reachability analyses can be fully described by specifying what things
> generate the characteristic you're analyzing, what things block (in the
> literature, "kill") it, and the transfer rules. It's often not the best
> way of implementing it, since the fully general framework can be pretty
> slow, but it's a concise way of describing things that you'll find in
> many textbooks. They talk in terms of maintaining GEN and KILL sets and
> describing when to add, subtract, union, and intersect the incoming &
> outgoing GENs and KILLs.


So what would be involved in adding hooks for arbitrary semantic analysis?

What language features can be described to allow for introduction of
arbitrary SA passes?  At what levels?

What's a good introductory glossary of SA terms? Things get confusing
with many reinvented wheels rolling around.