Power Programming

Dependency Analysis

Volume 6, Issue 1
Winter 1996

In a very large program, it can be difficult to anticipate the consequences of changing a small part of the code on the rest of the program. Many conventional languages have tools, such as callgraph analyzers and class browsers, that help the programmer understand the large-scale structure of a program. In this article, we will develop a package for analyzing symbol dependencies in a Mathematica program. This turns out to be quite an involved undertaking, as it requires the detailed analysis of expressions that must not be allowed to evaluate.