Field Sensitivity


Field Sensitivity

A Field Sensitive program analysis is an analysis (typically a pointer analysis) that distinguishes between different fields in a structure or object. For example, consider the following code:

f.x := 1; f.y := null;

A Field Sensitive analysis may be able to tell that f.y is null, and f.x is non-null, while a Field Insensitive analysis will consider f.x and f.y to be equivalent and not be able to conclude whether f.☐ does or does not point to null. (Here, we use as a wildcard for "any field").