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").