  Approximations during program analysis are a necessary evil, as they ensure
essential properties, such as soundness and termination of the analysis, but
they also imply not always producing useful results. Automatic techniques have
been studied to prevent precision loss, typically at the expense of larger
resource consumption. In both cases (i.e., when analysis produces inaccurate
results and when resource consumption is too high), it is necessary to have
some means for users to provide information to guide analysis and thus improve
precision and/or performance. We present techniques for supporting within an
abstract interpretation framework a rich set of assertions that can deal with
multivariance/context-sensitivity, and can handle different run-time semantics
for those assertions that cannot be discharged at compile time. We show how the
proposed approach can be applied to both improving precision and accelerating
analysis. We also provide some formal results on the effects of such assertions
on the analysis results.
