Whither Specifications as Programs

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Unifying theories distil common features of programming languages and design methods by means of algebraic operators and their laws. Several practical concerns—e.g., improvement of a program, conformance of code with design, correctness with respect to specified requirements—are subsumed by the beautiful notion that programs and designs are special forms of specification and their relationships are instances of logical implication between specifications. Mathematical development of this idea has been fruitful but limited to an impoverished notion of specification: trace properties. Some mathematically precise properties of programs, dubbed hyperproperties, refer to traces collectively. For example, confidentiality involves knowledge of possible traces. This article reports on both obvious and surprising results about lifting algebras of programming to hyperproperties, especially in connection with loops, and suggests directions for further research. The technical results are: a compositional semantics, at the hyper level, of imperative programs with loops, and proof that this semantics coincides with the direct image of a standard semantics, for subset closed hyperproperties.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationUnifying Theories of Programming - 7th International Symposium, UTP 2019, Dedicated to Tony Hoare on the Occasion of His 85th Birthday, Proceedings
EditorsPedro Ribeiro, Augusto Sampaio
Pages39-61
Number of pages23
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019
Event7th International Symposium on Unifying Theories of Programming, UTP 2019 - Porto, Portugal
Duration: 8 Oct 20198 Oct 2019

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11885 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference7th International Symposium on Unifying Theories of Programming, UTP 2019
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CityPorto
Period8/10/198/10/19

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