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One of the most common programming errors is the use of a variable before its definition. This undefined value may produce incorrect results, memory violations, unpredictable behaviors and program failure. To detect this kind of error, two approaches can be used: compile-time analysis and run-time checking. However, compile-time analysis is far from perfect because of complicated data and control flows as well as arrays with non-linear, indirection subscripts, etc. On the other hand, dynamic checking, although supported by hardware and compiler techniques, is costly due to heavy code instrumentation while information available at compile-time is not taken into account.

This paper presents a combination of an efficient compile-time analysis and a source code instrumentation for run-time checking. All kinds of variables are checked by PIPS, a Fortran research compiler for program analyses …