Tarski's fixpoint theorem and static analysis -- reference?

I'm curious to know the earliest paper that identifies Tarski's theorem
regarding the existence of least/greatest fixpoints of monotonic
functions on a complete lattice ("A Lattice Theoretical Fixpoint
Theorem and its Applications", Pacific J. of Math. 5, 285-309, 1955) as
the basis for termination of the standard dataflow analysis algorithms.


None of the "classical" data flow works I've read (Killdall '73, Kam &
Ullman '76, Kam & Ullman '77, Hecht '77) cite this paper, nor any of
the compilers textbooks Ive seen (the dragon book, Fischer & LeBlanc,
Muchnick's _Advanced Compiler Design_).


It is, however, given an appendix' worth of summary in the recent
_Principles of Program Analysis_ textbook by Nielson, Nielson, &
Hankin, suggesting to me that his relevance was identified by the
abstract interpretation community. Indeed, the earliest citation of
Tarski's paper that I've seen (within the static analysis community) is
the Cousots' original abstract interpretation paper from POPL 77, and
they later published a constructive proof of Tarksi's theorem, also in
the Pacific Journal of Mathematics [82(1), 1979].


Were they the first ones to observe the relevance of Tarski's theorem
to static analysis, or is there an earlier paper that cites him?


Thanks,
John
----------------------------------------------------------------------
John Fiskio-Lasseter
    * Phd. Student, CIS Dept., University of Oregon
    * Deschutes 234 x6-1385 johnfl@cs.uoregon.edu

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