Efficient Substitution in Hoare Logic Expressions

Substitution plays an important role in Hoare Logic, as it is used in interpreting assignments. When writing a computer-based realization of Hoare Logic, it is therefore important to choose a good implementation for it. In this paper we compare di#erent definitions and implementations of substitution in a logical framework, in an e#ort to maximize e#ciency. We start by defining substitution as a logical formula. In a conventional approach, this is done by specifying the syntactic changes substitution performs on expressions. We choose instead a semantic definition that describes the behavioral relation between the original expression and its substituted counterpart. Next, we use this semantic definition as an abstract specification, and compare two of its concrete implementations. The first we consider is the usual one, that operates recursively over the structure of the term. This requires a number of inference steps proportional to the size of the expression, which is unacceptable ..