Hoare logic (also known as Floyd–Hoare logic or Hoare rules) is a formal system with a set of logical rules for reasoning rigorously about the correctness of computer programs. It was proposed in 1969 by the British computer scientist and logician Tony Hoare, and subsequently refined by Hoare and other researchers. The original ideas were seeded by the work of Robert W. Floyd, who had published a similar system for flowcharts.
The central feature of Hoare logic is the Hoare triple. A triple describes how the execution of a piece of code changes the state of the computation. A Hoare triple is of the form
where and are assertions and is a command. is named the precondition and the postcondition: when the precondition is met, executing the command establishes the postcondition. Assertions are formulae in predicate logic.
Hoare logic provides axioms and inference rules for all the constructs of a simple imperative programming language. In addition to the rules for the simple language in Hoare's original paper, rules for other language constructs have been developed since then by Hoare and many other researchers. There are rules for concurrency, procedures, jumps, and pointers.
Using standard Hoare logic, only partial correctness can be proven. Total correctness additionally requires termination, which can be proven separately or with an extended version of the While rule. Thus the intuitive reading of a Hoare triple is: Whenever holds of the state before the execution of , then will hold afterwards, or does not terminate. In the latter case, there is no "after", so can be any statement at all. Indeed, one can choose to be false to express that does not terminate.
"Termination" here and in the rest of this article is meant in the broader sense that computation will eventually be finished, that is it implies the absence of infinite loops; it does not imply the absence of implementation limit violations (e.g. division by zero) stopping the program prematurely.
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We introduce formal verification as an approach for developing highly reliable systems. Formal verification finds proofs that computer systems work under all relevant scenarios. We will learn how to u
A hands-on introduction to interactive theorem proving, proofs as programs, dependent types, and to the Coq proof assistant. Come learn how to write bug-free code!
In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics. Formal verification can be helpful in proving the correctness of systems such as: cryptographic protocols, combinational circuits, digital circuits with internal memory, and software expressed as source code.
In computer programming, specifically when using the imperative programming paradigm, an assertion is a predicate (a Boolean-valued function over the state space, usually expressed as a logical proposition using the variables of a program) connected to a point in the program, that always should evaluate to true at that point in code execution. Assertions can help a programmer read the code, help a compiler compile it, or help the program detect its own defects.
In computer science, static program analysis (or static analysis) is the analysis of computer programs performed without executing them, in contrast with dynamic program analysis, which is performed on programs during their execution. The term is usually applied to analysis performed by an automated tool, with human analysis typically being called "program understanding", program comprehension, or code review. In the last of these, software inspection and software walkthroughs are also used.
Covers the concept of unfolding recursive functions using the Stainless tool.
Introduces Hoare logic for simplifying program behavior proofs through annotations.
Focuses on using Stainless for program verification, demonstrating the process of verifying programs and ensuring correctness.
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