Stone-Type Dualities for Separation Logics

Stone-type duality theorems, which relate algebraic and relational/topological models, are important tools in logic because -- in addition to elegant abstraction -- they strengthen soundness and completeness to a categorical equivalence, yielding a framework through which both algebraic and topological methods can be brought to bear on a logic. We give a systematic treatment of Stone-type duality for the structures that interpret bunched logics, starting with the weakest systems, recovering the familiar BI and Boolean BI (BBI), and extending to both classical and intuitionistic Separation Logic. We demonstrate the uniformity and modularity of this analysis by additionally capturing the bunched logics obtained by extending BI and BBI with modalities and multiplicative connectives corresponding to disjunction, negation and falsum. This includes the logic of separating modalities (LSM), De Morgan BI (DMBI), Classical BI (CBI), and the sub-classical family of logics extending Bi-intuitionistic (B)BI (Bi(B)BI). We additionally obtain as corollaries soundness and completeness theorems for the specific Kripke-style models of these logics as presented in the literature: for DMBI, the sub-classical logics extending BiBI and a new bunched logic, Concurrent Kleene BI (connecting our work to Concurrent Separation Logic), this is the first time soundness and completeness theorems have been proved. We thus obtain a comprehensive semantic account of the multiplicative variants of all standard propositional connectives in the bunched logic setting. This approach synthesises a variety of techniques from modal, substructural and categorical logic and contextualizes the "resource semantics" interpretation underpinning Separation Logic amongst them

From IF to BI: a tale of dependence and separation

We take a fresh look at the logics of informational dependence and independence of Hintikka and Sandu and Vaananen, and their compositional semantics due to Hodges. We show how Hodges' semantics can be seen as a special case of a general construction, which provides a context for a useful completeness theorem with respect to a wider class of models. We shed some new light on each aspect of the logic. We show that the natural propositional logic carried by the semantics is the logic of Bunched Implications due to Pym and O'Hearn, which combines intuitionistic and multiplicative connectives. This introduces several new connectives not previously considered in logics of informational dependence, but which we show play a very natural role, most notably intuitionistic implication. As regards the quantifiers, we show that their interpretation in the Hodges semantics is forced, in that they are the image under the general construction of the usual Tarski semantics; this implies that they are adjoints to substitution, and hence uniquely determined. As for the dependence predicate, we show that this is definable from a simpler predicate, of constancy or dependence on nothing. This makes essential use of the intuitionistic implication. The Armstrong axioms for functional dependence are then recovered as a standard set of axioms for intuitionistic implication. We also prove a full abstraction result in the style of Hodges, in which the intuitionistic implication plays a very natural r\^ole.Comment: 28 pages, journal versio

A Stone-type Duality Theorem for Separation Logic Via its Underlying Bunched Logics

Stone-type duality theorems, which relate algebraic and relational/topological models, are important tools in logic because — in addition to elegant abstraction — they strengthen soundness and completeness to a categorical equivalence, yielding a framework through which both algebraic and topological methods can be brought to bear on a logic. We give a systematic treatment of Stone-type duality theorems for the structures that interpret bunched logics, starting with the weakest systems, recovering the familiar Boolean BI, and concluding with Separation Logic. Our results encompass all the known existing algebraic approaches to Separation Logic and prove them sound with respect to the standard store-heap semantics. We additionally recover soundness and completeness theorems of the specific truth-functional models of these logics as presented in the literature. This approach synthesises a variety of techniques from modal, substructural and categorical logic and contextualises the ‘resource semantics’ interpretation underpinning Separation Logic amongst them. As a consequence, theory from those fields — as well as algebraic and topological methods — can be applied to both Separation Logic and the systems of bunched logics it is built upon. Conversely, the notion of indexed resource frame (generalizing the standard model of Separation Logic) and its associated completeness proof can easily be adapted to other non-classical predicate logics

Resource Usage Protocols for Iterators

We discuss usage protocols for iterator objects that prevent concurrent modifications of the underlying collection while iterators are in progress. We formalize these protocols in Java-like object interfaces, enriched with separation logic contracts. We present examples of iterator clients and proofs that they adhere to the iterator protocol, as well as examples of iterator implementations and proofs that they implement the iterator interface

On Spatial Conjunction as Second-Order Logic

Spatial conjunction is a powerful construct for reasoning about dynamically allocated data structures, as well as concurrent, distributed and mobile computation. While researchers have identified many uses of spatial conjunction, its precise expressive power compared to traditional logical constructs was not previously known. In this paper we establish the expressive power of spatial conjunction. We construct an embedding from first-order logic with spatial conjunction into second-order logic, and more surprisingly, an embedding from full second order logic into first-order logic with spatial conjunction. These embeddings show that the satisfiability of formulas in first-order logic with spatial conjunction is equivalent to the satisfiability of formulas in second-order logic. These results explain the great expressive power of spatial conjunction and can be used to show that adding unrestricted spatial conjunction to a decidable logic leads to an undecidable logic. As one example, we show that adding unrestricted spatial conjunction to two-variable logic leads to undecidability. On the side of decidability, the embedding into second-order logic immediately implies the decidability of first-order logic with a form of spatial conjunction over trees. The embedding into spatial conjunction also has useful consequences: because a restricted form of spatial conjunction in two-variable logic preserves decidability, we obtain that a correspondingly restricted form of second-order quantification in two-variable logic is decidable. The resulting language generalizes the first-order theory of boolean algebra over sets and is useful in reasoning about the contents of data structures in object-oriented languages.Comment: 16 page

Amortised resource analysis with separation logic

Type-based amortised resource analysis following Hofmann and Jost—where resources are associated with individual elements of data structures and doled out to the programmer under a linear typing discipline—have been successful in providing concrete resource bounds for functional programs, with good support for inference. In this work we translate the idea of amortised resource analysis to imperative languages by embedding a logic of resources, based on Bunched Implications, within Separation Logic. The Separation Logic component allows us to assert the presence and shape of mutable data structures on the heap, while the resource component allows us to state the resources associated with each member of the structure. We present the logic on a small imperative language with procedures and mutable heap, based on Java bytecode. We have formalised the logic within the Coq proof assistant and extracted a certified verification condition generator. We demonstrate the logic on some examples, including proving termination of in-place list reversal on lists with cyclic tails

A dependent nominal type theory

Nominal abstract syntax is an approach to representing names and binding pioneered by Gabbay and Pitts. So far nominal techniques have mostly been studied using classical logic or model theory, not type theory. Nominal extensions to simple, dependent and ML-like polymorphic languages have been studied, but decidability and normalization results have only been established for simple nominal type theories. We present a LF-style dependent type theory extended with name-abstraction types, prove soundness and decidability of beta-eta-equivalence checking, discuss adequacy and canonical forms via an example, and discuss extensions such as dependently-typed recursion and induction principles

Completeness for a First-order Abstract Separation Logic

Existing work on theorem proving for the assertion language of separation logic (SL) either focuses on abstract semantics which are not readily available in most applications of program verification, or on concrete models for which completeness is not possible. An important element in concrete SL is the points-to predicate which denotes a singleton heap. SL with the points-to predicate has been shown to be non-recursively enumerable. In this paper, we develop a first-order SL, called FOASL, with an abstracted version of the points-to predicate. We prove that FOASL is sound and complete with respect to an abstract semantics, of which the standard SL semantics is an instance. We also show that some reasoning principles involving the points-to predicate can be approximated as FOASL theories, thus allowing our logic to be used for reasoning about concrete program verification problems. We give some example theories that are sound with respect to different variants of separation logics from the literature, including those that are incompatible with Reynolds's semantics. In the experiment we demonstrate our FOASL based theorem prover which is able to handle a large fragment of separation logic with heap semantics as well as non-standard semantics.Comment: This is an extended version of the APLAS 2016 paper with the same titl