Modelling the algebra of weakest preconditions

In expounding the notions of pre- and postconditions, of termination and nontermination, of correctness and of predicate transformers I found that the same trivalent distinction played a major role in all contexts. Namely: Initialisation properties: An execution of a program always, sometimes or never starts from an initial state. Termination/nontermination properties: If it starts, the execution always, sometimes or never terminates. Clean-/messy termination properties: A terminating execution always, sometimes or never terminates cleanly. Final state properties: All, some or no final states of α from s have a given property

NONDETERMINACY AND RECURSION VIA STACKS AND GAMES

The weakest-precondition interpretation of recursive procedures is developed for a language with a combination of unbounded demonic choice and unbounded angelic choice. This compositional formal semantics is proved to be equal to a game-theoretic operational semantics. Two intermediate stages are exploited. One step consists of unfolding the declaration of the recursive procedures. Fixpoint induction is used to prove the validity of this step. The compositional semantics of the unfolded declaration is proved to be equal to a formal semantics of a stack implementation of the recursive procedures. After an introduction to boolean two-person games, this stack semantics is shown to correspond to a game-theoretic operational semantics