21,620 research outputs found
Computer-Assisted Program Reasoning Based on a Relational Semantics of Programs
We present an approach to program reasoning which inserts between a program
and its verification conditions an additional layer, the denotation of the
program expressed in a declarative form. The program is first translated into
its denotation from which subsequently the verification conditions are
generated. However, even before (and independently of) any verification
attempt, one may investigate the denotation itself to get insight into the
"semantic essence" of the program, in particular to see whether the denotation
indeed gives reason to believe that the program has the expected behavior.
Errors in the program and in the meta-information may thus be detected and
fixed prior to actually performing the formal verification. More concretely,
following the relational approach to program semantics, we model the effect of
a program as a binary relation on program states. A formal calculus is devised
to derive from a program a logic formula that describes this relation and is
subject for inspection and manipulation. We have implemented this idea in a
comprehensive form in the RISC ProgramExplorer, a new program reasoning
environment for educational purposes which encompasses the previously developed
RISC ProofNavigator as an interactive proving assistant.Comment: In Proceedings THedu'11, arXiv:1202.453
Termination Analysis by Learning Terminating Programs
We present a novel approach to termination analysis. In a first step, the
analysis uses a program as a black-box which exhibits only a finite set of
sample traces. Each sample trace is infinite but can be represented by a finite
lasso. The analysis can "learn" a program from a termination proof for the
lasso, a program that is terminating by construction. In a second step, the
analysis checks that the set of sample traces is representative in a sense that
we can make formal. An experimental evaluation indicates that the approach is a
potentially useful addition to the portfolio of existing approaches to
termination analysis
Fifty years of Hoare's Logic
We present a history of Hoare's logic.Comment: 79 pages. To appear in Formal Aspects of Computin
12th International Workshop on Termination (WST 2012) : WST 2012, February 19–23, 2012, Obergurgl, Austria / ed. by Georg Moser
This volume contains the proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Termination (WST 2012), to be held February 19–23, 2012 in Obergurgl, Austria. The goal of the Workshop on Termination is to be a venue for presentation and discussion of all topics in and around termination. In this way, the workshop tries to bridge the gaps between different communities interested and active in research in and around termination. The 12th International Workshop on Termination in Obergurgl continues the successful workshops held in St. Andrews (1993), La Bresse (1995), Ede (1997), Dagstuhl (1999), Utrecht (2001), Valencia (2003), Aachen (2004), Seattle (2006), Paris (2007), Leipzig (2009), and Edinburgh (2010). The 12th International Workshop on Termination did welcome contributions on all aspects of termination and complexity analysis. Contributions from the imperative, constraint, functional, and logic programming communities, and papers investigating applications of complexity or termination (for example in program transformation or theorem proving) were particularly welcome. We did receive 18 submissions which all were accepted. Each paper was assigned two reviewers. In addition to these 18 contributed talks, WST 2012, hosts three invited talks by Alexander Krauss, Martin Hofmann, and Fausto Spoto
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Automated verification of refinement laws
Demonic refinement algebras are variants of Kleene algebras. Introduced by von Wright as a light-weight variant of the refinement calculus, their intended semantics are positively disjunctive predicate transformers, and their calculus is entirely within first-order equational logic. So, for the first time, off-the-shelf automated theorem proving (ATP) becomes available for refinement proofs. We used ATP to verify a toolkit of basic refinement laws. Based on this toolkit, we then verified two classical complex refinement laws for action systems by ATP: a data refinement law and Back's atomicity refinement law. We also present a refinement law for infinite loops that has been discovered through automated analysis. Our proof experiments not only demonstrate that refinement can effectively be automated, they also compare eleven different ATP systems and suggest that program verification with variants of Kleene algebras yields interesting theorem proving benchmarks. Finally, we apply hypothesis learning techniques that seem indispensable for automating more complex proofs
Loops under Strategies ... Continued
While there are many approaches for automatically proving termination of term
rewrite systems, up to now there exist only few techniques to disprove their
termination automatically. Almost all of these techniques try to find loops,
where the existence of a loop implies non-termination of the rewrite system.
However, most programming languages use specific evaluation strategies, whereas
loop detection techniques usually do not take strategies into account. So even
if a rewrite system has a loop, it may still be terminating under certain
strategies.
Therefore, our goal is to develop decision procedures which can determine
whether a given loop is also a loop under the respective evaluation strategy.
In earlier work, such procedures were presented for the strategies of
innermost, outermost, and context-sensitive evaluation. In the current paper,
we build upon this work and develop such decision procedures for important
strategies like leftmost-innermost, leftmost-outermost,
(max-)parallel-innermost, (max-)parallel-outermost, and forbidden patterns
(which generalize innermost, outermost, and context-sensitive strategies). In
this way, we obtain the first approach to disprove termination under these
strategies automatically.Comment: In Proceedings IWS 2010, arXiv:1012.533
An Exercise in Invariant-based Programming with Interactive and Automatic Theorem Prover Support
Invariant-Based Programming (IBP) is a diagram-based correct-by-construction
programming methodology in which the program is structured around the
invariants, which are additionally formulated before the actual code. Socos is
a program construction and verification environment built specifically to
support IBP. The front-end to Socos is a graphical diagram editor, allowing the
programmer to construct invariant-based programs and check their correctness.
The back-end component of Socos, the program checker, computes the verification
conditions of the program and tries to prove them automatically. It uses the
theorem prover PVS and the SMT solver Yices to discharge as many of the
verification conditions as possible without user interaction. In this paper, we
first describe the Socos environment from a user and systems level perspective;
we then exemplify the IBP workflow by building a verified implementation of
heapsort in Socos. The case study highlights the role of both automatic and
interactive theorem proving in three sequential stages of the IBP workflow:
developing the background theory, formulating the program specification and
invariants, and proving the correctness of the final implementation.Comment: In Proceedings THedu'11, arXiv:1202.453
On Multiphase-Linear Ranking Functions
Multiphase ranking functions () were proposed as a means
to prove the termination of a loop in which the computation progresses through
a number of "phases", and the progress of each phase is described by a
different linear ranking function. Our work provides new insights regarding
such functions for loops described by a conjunction of linear constraints
(single-path loops). We provide a complete polynomial-time solution to the
problem of existence and of synthesis of of bounded depth
(number of phases), when variables range over rational or real numbers; a
complete solution for the (harder) case that variables are integer, with a
matching lower-bound proof, showing that the problem is coNP-complete; and a
new theorem which bounds the number of iterations for loops with
. Surprisingly, the bound is linear, even when the
variables involved change in non-linear way. We also consider a type of
lexicographic ranking functions, , more expressive than types
of lexicographic functions for which complete solutions have been given so far.
We prove that for the above type of loops, lexicographic functions can be
reduced to , and thus the questions of complexity of
detection and synthesis, and of resulting iteration bounds, are also answered
for this class.Comment: typos correcte
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