[Checkers] Question about the flow algorithm

[Adam Warski]

Hello,

I've commited an implementation of the changes I wrote here about to  
the typestate checker's GIT repository:

http://github.com/adamw/jsr308-typestate-checker/blob/8b6eef49eaa2fa14642a4d09668d0bab02627957/src/checkers/flow/MainFlow.java

lines 619 and below. The method has some comments so hopefully you'll  
understand it :). The "MainFlow" is a simplified version of your  
"Flow" class, and the try-catch-finally handling is a bit tailored  
towards the typestate checker, but maybe you could modify/reuse it in  
some way in the checkers framework.

The method makes the distinction between "dead" and "alive" catches,  
as I wrote in my previous mails. It also evaluates the finally for two  
cases: "dead" catches + exception bypass, and "alive" cathces + no  
exceptions at all. Also, exceptions thrown in catches are properly  
handled. This I think covers the cases possible.

The algorithm can of course be still much improved, as it's very  
conservative on nested exceptions handling, meaning that it assumes  
that every exception can bypass the first catch and propagate to the  
second one, etc. The way to improve would be of course to check what  
exceptions are caught (for example if "Exception" is caught, than the  
exception won't be propagated for sure; unless it's an Error, but  
that's serious system trouble, not an application problem). Also, it  
could be checked what exceptions do the methods throw, and only update  
the bits for the appropriate catch blocks.

Adam