Accession Number:

ADA027455

Title:

Automatic Program Verification V: Verification-Oriented Proof Rules for Arrays, Records, and Pointers

Descriptive Note:

Corporate Author:

STANFORD UNIV CA DEPT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Personal Author(s):

• Luckham, David
• Suzuki, Norihisa

Report Date:

1976-03-01

Pagination or Media Count:

53.0

Abstract:

A practical method is presented for automating in a uniform way the verification of Pascal programs that operate on the standard Pascal data structures ARRAY. RECORD, and POINTER. New assertion language primitives are introduced for describing computational effects of operations on these data structures. Axioms defining the semantics of the new primitives are given. Proof rules for standard Pascal operations on pointer variables are then defined in terms of the extended assertion language. Similar rules for records and arrays are special cases. An extensible axiomatic rule for the Pascal memory allocation operation, NEW, is also given. These rules have been implemented in the Stanford Pascal program verifier. Examples illustrating the verification of programs which operate on list structures implemented with pointers and records are discussed. These include programs with side-effects.

Descriptors:

• *COMPUTER PROGRAMMING
• ALLOCATIONS
• BOOLEAN ALGEBRA
• MEMORY DEVICES
• SEMANTICS

Subject Categories:

• Computer Programming and Software
• Computer Hardware
• Computer Systems Management and Standards

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE