Structural analysis: A new approach to flow analysis in optimizing compilers

In this paper we present a new technique for analyzing the control flow of a computer program. This technique, called structural analysis, extends new interval analysis techniques and produces a program representation in which structured control-flow patterns are detected and recorded. This representation supports data-flow analysis elimination techniques similar to Rosen's high-level data-flow analysis technique, which are faster than interval-based methods. Morever, these results indicate that flow-graph based program analysis and direct analysis of the program's parse-tree can be performed by essentially the same methods, making uniform data-flow analysis procedure for optimizing compilers possible.