DETERMINING DYNAMIC PROPERTIES OF PROGRAMS

Techniques for obtaining information about dynamic properties of a program. The techniques involve programming a programmable execution environment such as a debugger so that when the program is executed in the execution environment, side effects of the execution provide the information about the dynamic properties. The program for the execution environment is produced by a source code analyzer which statically analyzes the source code. The source code analyzer is in turn produced by a code analyzer generator. Output from the execution environment may be provided to a graphical display system. In one use of the techniques, the code analyzer generator not only generates a source code analyzer for producing the program for the execution environment, but also a source code analyzer for producing a program which when executed by a graphical browser makes a flow graph for the program. In this case, the graphical browser responds to the output from the execution environment by altering the appearance of the flow graph.