Completeness and complexity of reasoning about call-by-value in Hoare logic

We provide a sound and relatively complete Hoare logic for reasoning about partial correctness of recursive procedures in presence of local variables and the call-by-value parameter mechanism and in which the correctness proofs support contracts and are linear in the length of the program. We argue that in spite of the fact that Hoare logics for recursive procedures were intensively studied, no such logic has been proposed in the literature

Fifty years of Hoare's Logic

We present a history of Hoare's logic.Comment: 79 pages. To appear in Formal Aspects of Computin

A program logic for resources

AbstractWe introduce a reasoning infrastructure for proving statements about resource consumption in a fragment of the Java Virtual Machine Language (JVML). The infrastructure is based on a small hierarchy of program logics, with increasing levels of abstraction: at the top there is a type system for a high-level language that encodes resource consumption. The infrastructure is designed to be used in a proof-carrying code (PCC) scenario, where mobile programs can be equipped with formal evidence that they have predictable resource behaviour.This article focuses on the core logic in our infrastructure, a VDM-style program logic for partial correctness, which can make statements about resource consumption alongside functional behaviour. We establish some important results for this logic, including soundness and completeness with respect to a resource-aware operational semantics for the JVML. We also present a second logic built on top of the core logic, which is used to express termination; it too is shown to be sound and complete. We then outline how high-level language type systems may be connected to these logics.The entire infrastructure has been formalized in Isabelle/HOL, both to enhance the confidence in our meta-theoretical results, and to provide a prototype implementation for PCC. We give examples to show the usefulness of this approach, including proofs of resource bounds on code resulting from compiling high-level functional programs

Hoare Logics for Recursive Procedures and Unbounded Nondeterminism

This paper presents sound and complete Hoare logics for partial and total correctness of recursive parameterless procedures in the context of unbounded nondeterminism. For total correctness, the literature so far has either restricted recursive procedures to be deterministic or has studied unbounded nondeterminism only in conjunction with loops rather than procedures. We consider both single procedures and systems of mutually recursive procedures. All proofs have been checked with the theorem prover Isabelle/HOL