Is the valid state domain of a program a regular language?

Posted by BCS on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by BCS
Published on 2010-04-09T21:18:33Z Indexed on 2010/04/09 21:33 UTC
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formal-languages

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bug-tracking

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stacktrace

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tools

If you look at the call stack of a program and treat each return pointer as a token, what kind of automata is needed to build a recognizer for the valid states of the program?

As a corollary, what kind of automata is needed to build a recognizer for a specific bug state?

My thought is that if these form regular languages than some interesting tools could be built around that. E.g. given a set of crash/failure dumps, automatically group them and generate a recognizer to identify new instances of know bugs.

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