85,507 research outputs found
Implementing and reasoning about hash-consed data structures in Coq
We report on four different approaches to implementing hash-consing in Coq
programs. The use cases include execution inside Coq, or execution of the
extracted OCaml code. We explore the different trade-offs between faithful use
of pristine extracted code, and code that is fine-tuned to make use of OCaml
programming constructs not available in Coq. We discuss the possible
consequences in terms of performances and guarantees. We use the running
example of binary decision diagrams and then demonstrate the generality of our
solutions by applying them to other examples of hash-consed data structures
A Logic of Reachable Patterns in Linked Data-Structures
We define a new decidable logic for expressing and checking invariants of
programs that manipulate dynamically-allocated objects via pointers and
destructive pointer updates. The main feature of this logic is the ability to
limit the neighborhood of a node that is reachable via a regular expression
from a designated node. The logic is closed under boolean operations
(entailment, negation) and has a finite model property. The key technical
result is the proof of decidability. We show how to express precondition,
postconditions, and loop invariants for some interesting programs. It is also
possible to express properties such as disjointness of data-structures, and
low-level heap mutations. Moreover, our logic can express properties of
arbitrary data-structures and of an arbitrary number of pointer fields. The
latter provides a way to naturally specify postconditions that relate the
fields on entry to a procedure to the fields on exit. Therefore, it is possible
to use the logic to automatically prove partial correctness of programs
performing low-level heap mutations
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