7,289 research outputs found
Size-Change Termination as a Contract
Termination is an important but undecidable program property, which has led
to a large body of work on static methods for conservatively predicting or
enforcing termination. One such method is the size-change termination approach
of Lee, Jones, and Ben-Amram, which operates in two phases: (1) abstract
programs into "size-change graphs," and (2) check these graphs for the
size-change property: the existence of paths that lead to infinite decreasing
sequences.
We transpose these two phases with an operational semantics that accounts for
the run-time enforcement of the size-change property, postponing (or entirely
avoiding) program abstraction. This choice has two key consequences: (1)
size-change termination can be checked at run-time and (2) termination can be
rephrased as a safety property analyzed using existing methods for systematic
abstraction.
We formulate run-time size-change checks as contracts in the style of Findler
and Felleisen. The result compliments existing contracts that enforce partial
correctness specifications to obtain contracts for total correctness. Our
approach combines the robustness of the size-change principle for termination
with the precise information available at run-time. It has tunable overhead and
can check for nontermination without the conservativeness necessary in static
checking. To obtain a sound and computable termination analysis, we apply
existing abstract interpretation techniques directly to the operational
semantics, avoiding the need for custom abstractions for termination. The
resulting analyzer is competitive with with existing, purpose-built analyzers
Polynomial Interpretations for Higher-Order Rewriting
The termination method of weakly monotonic algebras, which has been defined
for higher-order rewriting in the HRS formalism, offers a lot of power, but has
seen little use in recent years. We adapt and extend this method to the
alternative formalism of algebraic functional systems, where the simply-typed
lambda-calculus is combined with algebraic reduction. Using this theory, we
define higher-order polynomial interpretations, and show how the implementation
challenges of this technique can be tackled. A full implementation is provided
in the termination tool WANDA
The AutoProof Verifier: Usability by Non-Experts and on Standard Code
Formal verification tools are often developed by experts for experts; as a
result, their usability by programmers with little formal methods experience
may be severely limited. In this paper, we discuss this general phenomenon with
reference to AutoProof: a tool that can verify the full functional correctness
of object-oriented software. In particular, we present our experiences of using
AutoProof in two contrasting contexts representative of non-expert usage.
First, we discuss its usability by students in a graduate course on software
verification, who were tasked with verifying implementations of various sorting
algorithms. Second, we evaluate its usability in verifying code developed for
programming assignments of an undergraduate course. The first scenario
represents usability by serious non-experts; the second represents usability on
"standard code", developed without full functional verification in mind. We
report our experiences and lessons learnt, from which we derive some general
suggestions for furthering the development of verification tools with respect
to improving their usability.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2015, arXiv:1508.0338
Towards an Intelligent Tutor for Mathematical Proofs
Computer-supported learning is an increasingly important form of study since
it allows for independent learning and individualized instruction. In this
paper, we discuss a novel approach to developing an intelligent tutoring system
for teaching textbook-style mathematical proofs. We characterize the
particularities of the domain and discuss common ITS design models. Our
approach is motivated by phenomena found in a corpus of tutorial dialogs that
were collected in a Wizard-of-Oz experiment. We show how an intelligent tutor
for textbook-style mathematical proofs can be built on top of an adapted
assertion-level proof assistant by reusing representations and proof search
strategies originally developed for automated and interactive theorem proving.
The resulting prototype was successfully evaluated on a corpus of tutorial
dialogs and yields good results.Comment: In Proceedings THedu'11, arXiv:1202.453
Polynomial Path Orders: A Maximal Model
This paper is concerned with the automated complexity analysis of term
rewrite systems (TRSs for short) and the ramification of these in implicit
computational complexity theory (ICC for short). We introduce a novel path
order with multiset status, the polynomial path order POP*. Essentially relying
on the principle of predicative recursion as proposed by Bellantoni and Cook,
its distinct feature is the tight control of resources on compatible TRSs: The
(innermost) runtime complexity of compatible TRSs is polynomially bounded. We
have implemented the technique, as underpinned by our experimental evidence our
approach to the automated runtime complexity analysis is not only feasible, but
compared to existing methods incredibly fast. As an application in the context
of ICC we provide an order-theoretic characterisation of the polytime
computable functions. To be precise, the polytime computable functions are
exactly the functions computable by an orthogonal constructor TRS compatible
with POP*
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