LoopW Technical Reference v0.3

This document describes the implementation in SML of the LoopW language, an imperative language with higher-order procedural variables and non-local jumps equiped with a program logic. It includes the user manual along with some implementation notes and many examples of certified imperative programs. As a concluding example, we show the certification of an imperative program encoding shift/reset using callcc/throw and a global meta-continuation

Reducing the Number of Annotations in a Verification-oriented Imperative Language

Automated software verification is a very active field of research which has made enormous progress both in theoretical and practical aspects. Recently, an important amount of research effort has been put into applying these techniques on top of mainstream programming languages. These languages typically provide powerful features such as reflection, aliasing and polymorphism which are handy for practitioners but, in contrast, make verification a real challenge. In this work we present Pest, a simple experimental, while-style, multiprocedural, imperative programming language which was conceived with verifiability as one of its main goals. This language forces developers to concurrently think about both the statements needed to implement an algorithm and the assertions required to prove its correctness. In order to aid programmers, we propose several techniques to reduce the number and complexity of annotations required to successfully verify their programs. In particular, we show that high-level iteration constructs may alleviate the need for providing complex loop annotations.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

C# 3.0 makes OCL redundant!

Other than its 'platform independence' the major advantages of OCL over traditional Object Oriented programming languages has been the declarative nature of the language, its powerful navigation facility via the iteration operations, and the availability of tuples as a first class concept. The recent offering from Microsoft of the "Orcas" version of Visual Studio with C# 3.0 and the Linq library provides functionality almost identical to that of OCL. This paper examines and evaluates the controversial thesis that, as a result of C# 3.0, OCL is essentially redundant, having been superseded by the incorporation of its advantageous features into a mainstream programming language

A Formally Specified Type System and Operational Semantics for Higher-Order Procedural Variables

We formally specified the type system and operational semantics of LOOPw with Ott and Isabelle/HOL proof assistant. Moreover, both the type system and the semantics of LOOPw have been tested using Isabelle/HOL program extraction facility for inductively defined relations. In particular, the program that computes the Ackermann function type checks and behaves as expected. The main difference (apart from the choice of an Ada-like concrete syntax) with LOOPw comes from the treatment of parameter passing. Indeed, since Ott does not currently fully support alpha-conversion, we rephrased the operational semantics with explicit aliasing in order to implement the out parameter passing mode