Meta-evaluation of Actors with Side-effects

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Office of Naval Research contract N000-14-74-C-0643.Meta-evaluation is a process which symbolically evaluates an actor and checks to see whether the actor fulfills its contract (specification). A formalism for writing contracts for actors with side-effects which allow sharing of data is presented. Typical examples of actors with side-effects are the cell, actor counterparts of the LISP function rplaca and rplacd, and procedures whose computation depends upon their input history. Meta-evaluation of actors with side-effects is carried out by using situational tags which denotes a situation (local state of an actor systems at the moment of the transmissions of messages). It is illustrated how the situational tags are used for proving the termination of the activation of actors.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Programmiersprachen und Rechenkonzepte

Seit 1984 veranstaltet die GI-Fachgruppe "Programmiersprachen und Rechenkonzepte" regelmäßig im Frühjahr einen Workshop im Physikzentrum Bad Honnef. Das Treffen dient in erster Linie dem gegenseitigen Kennenlernen, dem Erfahrungsaustausch, der Diskussion und der Vertiefung gegenseitiger Kontakte. In diesem Forum werden Vorträge und Demonstrationen sowohl bereits abgeschlossener als auch noch laufender Arbeiten vorgestellt, unter anderem (aber nicht ausschließlich) zu Themen wie - Sprachen, Sprachparadigmen, - Korrektheit von Entwurf und Implementierung, -Werkzeuge, -Software-/Hardware-Architekturen, -Spezifikation, Entwurf, - Validierung, Verifikation, - Implementierung, Integration, - Sicherheit (Safety und Security), - eingebettete Systeme, - hardware-nahe Programmierung. In diesem Technischen Bericht sind einige der präsentierten Arbeiten zusammen gestellt

Symbol IC-Evaluation as an Aid to Program Synthesis

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advance Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defence under Office of Naval Research contract N00014-75-C0522.Symbolic-evaluation is the process which abstractly evaluates an actor program and checks to see whether the program fulfills its contract (specification). In this paper, a formalism based on the conceptual representation is proposed as a specification language and a proof system for programs which may include change of behavior (side-effects). The relation between algebraic specifications and the specifications based on the conceptual representation is discussed and the limitation of the current algebraic specifications is pointed out. The proposed formalism can deal with problems of side-effects which have been beyond the scope of Floyd-Hoare proof rules. Symbolic-evaluation is carried out with explicit use of the notion of situation (local state of an actor system). Uses of situational tags in assertions make it possible to state relations holding between objects in different situations. As an illustrative example, an impure actors which behave like a queue is extensively examined. The verification of a procedure which deals with the queue-actors and the correctness of its implementations are demonstrated by the symbolic-evaluation. Furthermore how the symbolic-evaluation serves as an aid to program synthesis is illustrated using two different implementations of the queue-actor.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agenc

Fifty years of Hoare's Logic

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

TTSS'11 - 5th International Workshop on Harnessing Theories for Tool Support in Software

The aim of the workshop is to bring together practitioners and researchers from academia, industry and government to present and discuss ideas about: • How to deal with the complexity of software projects by multi-view modeling and separation of concerns about the design of functionality, interaction, concurrency, scheduling, and nonfunctional requirements, and • How to ensure correctness and dependability of software by integrating formal methods and tools for modeling, design, verification and validation into design and development processes and environments. • Case studies and experience reports about harnessing static analysis tools such as model checking, theorem proving, testing, as well as runtime monitoring