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Subject: PEM: Thomas Reps (University of Wisconsin) | The Use of Program Profiling for Software Maintenance with Applications to the Year 2000 Problem | 13.06.97  PEM: Susan Horwitz and Marc Shapiro (University of Wisconsin) | Flow-Insensitive Pointer Analysis | 13.06.97

 
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Subject: PEM meeting | 13.06.97 | F013, UvA WINS 
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   This announcement can be found at <http://www.cwi.nl/~pem>

         The Use of Program Profiling for Software Maintenance with
                   Applications to the Year 2000 Problem

   Date:    13.06.97
   Time:    14:00
   Venue:   F013, UvA WINS
   Speaker: Thomas Reps (University of Wisconsin)
   Title:   The Use of Program Profiling for Software Maintenance
with Applications to the Year 2000 Problem

   The world faces cataclysmic breakdown at the turn of the millennium!

   While this alarm may be old news to anyone who was present at the turn
   of the last millennium, there are significant reasons for residents of
   the  (first)  world  to  be  concerned  this time around: Because many
   computer  programs  use  only  two  digits  to  record  year values in
   date-valued data, they may process a year value of 00 as 1900 in cases
   where  2000  was  intended.  If the intended value is 2000 --- such as
   when  00  represents  the  value  of the current year in a computation
   performed  after the calendar rolls over on January 1, 2000 --- then a
   faulty  computation  may  be  carried  out.  Because  computations can
   involve  dates in the future, the phenomenon can occur well before the
   calendar   rolls  over  on  January  1,  2000.  For  example,  if  the
   (approximate)  age of someone born in 1956 were calculated for January
   1, 2000, he would appear to be 00 - 56 = -56 years old!

   Last  summer,  I  was  asked by the Defense Advanced Research Projects
   Agency  (DARPA)  to  help  them  plan  a project aimed at reducing the
   impact  of  the  Year 2000 (Y2K) problem on the Department of Defense.
   DARPA   was   particularly  interested  in  whether  there  were  "any
   techniques  in the research community that could be applied to the Y2K
   problem  and  have  impact  beyond present commercial Y2K products and
   services".  The  most  exciting of the ideas that turned up concerns a
   method  for  using path profiling as a heuristic to locate some of the
   sites in a program where there are problematic date manipulations. The
   technique   is   actually   applicable   to  a  much  wider  range  of
   software-maintenance  problems  than  just the Y2K problem, and offers
   new perspectives on testing, on the task of creating test data, and on
   what tools can be created to support program testing.

   (This  is  joint  work  with  T.  Ball,  M. Das, and J. Larus. A paper
   describing  the  work  will appear in the Proceedings of ESEC/FSE '97:
   Sixth  European  Software Engineering Conference and Fifth ACM SIGSOFT
   Symposium   on  the  Foundations  of  Software  Engineering,  (Zurich,
   Switzerland,  Sept.  22-25,  1997), Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
   Springer-Verlag,  New  York, NY, 1997. The technical-report version is
   available  over  the  World  Wide Web at URL http://www.cs.wisc.edu/wp
   is/papers/tr1335.ps.)
     _________________________________________________________________

   The  programming environment meetings are a forum for the presentation
   and  discussion  of  new  ideas,  ongoing and finished work. A typical
   meeting  addresses  a subject in the area of programming environments,
   program  generation, algebraic specification, term rewriting, parsing,
   etc.  A presentation ideally takes between 45 and 90 minutes. Meetings
   taking  longer  than 45 minutes are interrupted by a coffeebreak. Most
   Thursdays,  a  meeting is held which starts at 10:00 am. in one of the
   rooms at CWI/WINS. Exceptionally, dates or times may change.

   The    program    of    the    meetings    is    available   on   WWW:
   http://www.cwi.nl/~pem
     _________________________________________________________________