Flexible Verification Conditions with Continuations and Barriers

Andrei Paskevich (1, 2)

1 TOCCATA - Formally Verified Programs, Certified Tools and Numerical Computations
2 LMF - Laboratoire Méthodes Formelles

Continuation-passing style allows us to devise an extremely economical abstract syntax for a generic algorithmic language. This syntax is flexible enough to naturally express conditionals, loops, (higher-order) function calls, and exception handling. It is type-agnostic and state-agnostic, which means that we can combine it with a wide range of type and effect systems. We argue that this syntax is also well suited for the purposes of deductive verification. Indeed, we show how it can be augmented in a natural way with specification annotations, ghost code, and side-effect discipline. We define the rules of verification condition generation for this syntax, and we show that the resulting formulas are nearly identical to what traditional approaches, like the weakest precondition calculus, produce for the equivalent algorithmic constructions.

Domains: Computer Science [cs]

Andrei Paskevich. Flexible Verification Conditions with Continuations and Barriers. 2023. ⟨hal-04115885v1⟩