BI as an assertion language for mutable data structures

BI as an Assertion Language for Mutable Data

An Assertion Language for Constraint Logic Programs

In an advanced program development environment, such as that discussed in the introduction of this book, several tools may coexist which handle both the program and information on the program in different ways. Also, these tools may interact among themselves and with the user. Thus, the different tools and the user need some way to communicate. It is our design principie that such communication...

Computability and Complexity Results for a Spatial Assertion Language for Data Structures

This paper studies a recently developed an approach to reasoning about mutable data structures, which uses an assertion language with spatial conjunction and implication connectives. We investigate computability and complexity properties of a subset of the language, which allows statements about the shape of pointer structures (such as “there is a link from x to y”) to be made, but not statemen...

Separation Logic: A Logic for Shared Mutable Data Structures

In joint work with Peter O’Hearn and others, based on early ideas of Burstall, we have developed an extension of Hoare logic that permits reasoning about low-level imperative programs that use shared mutable data structure. The simple imperative programming language is extended with commands (not expressions) for accessing and modifying shared structures, and for explicit allocation and dealloc...

Assertion-Directed Precondition Synthesis for Loops over Data Structures

Program verification typically generates verification conditions for a program to be proven and then uses a theorem prover to prove their correctness. These verification conditions are normally generated by means of weakest-precondition calculus. Nevertheless, the weakestprecondition calculus faces a big challenge when dealing with loops. In this paper, we propose a framework that automatically...