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From: "Stuart" <stuart@0.0>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
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Subject: Re: What is wrong with Ada?
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 08:39:58 +0100
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Date: 2007-04-13T08:39:58+01:00
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"Georg Bauhaus" <bauhaus@futureapps.de> wrote in message 
news:1176412709.5632.55.camel@localhost.localdomain...
> On Thu, 2007-04-12 at 14:47 -0400, Robert A Duff wrote:
>
>> And it is impossible to cover all paths in a program containing
>> unbounded loops or recursion, because there are an infinite number of
>> them.
>
> Just out of curiosity: If I have a suitable annotated program,
> is there a tool that can give a good estimate on the number of
> steps along a selection of paths that indicates the program
> is running in circles? (Not that I expect to be still alive when
> the test has finished... :-)

SPARK does analyze loops for stability (stops doing anything apparently 
useful) and reports how many iterations it takes (its index).  That is a 
fairly crude description - I expect Peter or Rod might chip in with some 
more detail.

A Google search on "flow analysis" and "loop stability" throws up quite 
useful references - including an ACM paper on: "Information-Flow and 
Data-Flow Analysis of while Programs" by Bergeretti and Carre.

-- 
Stuart