Dependency analysis for Standard ML

Abstract

Automatic dependency analysis is a useful addition to a system like CM, our compilation manager for Standard ML of New Jersey. It relieves the programmer from the tedious and error-prone task of having to specify compilation dependencies by hand and thereby makes its usage more user friendly. But dependency analysis is not easy, as the general problem for Standard ML is NP-complete. Therefore, CM has to impose certain restrictions on the programming language to recover tractability. We prove the NP-completeness result, discuss the restrictions on ML that are used by CM, and provide the resulting analysis algorithms.