Alias-based Reasoning for Object-Oriented Programs

Aliasing is the key problem that makes reasoning about reference structures hard. Large predicates have to be constructed that capture all aliasing properties of a given state. Instead of deducing the aliasing properties from a state that uses heaps and objects, we declare the alias-relation to be the state itself. We explore if such a state model provides a new and beneficial approach to the verification of object-oriented programs. As a demonstration, we introduce a small reference language SOL and describe an axiomatic semantics for it. Then we prove a non-trivial program using this semantics.