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An Exercise in Verifying Sequential Programs with VerCors

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Authors:

  • Joosten, Sebastiaan J. C.
  • Oortwijn, Wytse
  • Safari, Mohsen
  • Huisman, Marieke

20th Workshop on Formal Techniques for Java-like Programs Formal techniques : FTfJP 2018 with ECOOP and ISSTA, FTfJP 2018 ; Conference date: 16-07-2018 Through 21-07-2018

https://conf.researchr.org/track/FTfJP-2018/FTfJP-2018-papers

Abstract:

Society nowadays relies heavily on software, which makes verifying the correctness of software crucially important. Various verification tools have been proposed for this purpose, each focusing on a limited set of tasks, as there are many different ways to build and reason about software. This paper discusses two case studies from the VerifyThis2018 verification competition, worked out using the VerCors verification toolset. Interestingly, these case studies are sequential, while VerCors specialises in reasoning about parallel and concurrent software. This paper elaborates on our experiences of using VerCors to verify sequential programs. The first case study involves specifying and verifying the behaviour of a gap buffer; a data-structure commonly used in text editors. The second case study involves verifying a combinatorial problem based on Project Euler problem #114. We find that VerCors is well capable of reasoning about sequential software, and that certain techniques to reason about concurrency can help to reason about sequential programs. However, the extra annotations required to reason about concurrency bring some specificational overhead.

BibTeX entry:

@conference{Joosten18a,
 abstract = {Society nowadays relies heavily on software, which makes verifying the correctness of software crucially important. Various verification tools have been proposed for this purpose, each focusing on a limited set of tasks, as there are many different ways to build and reason about software. This paper discusses two case studies from the VerifyThis2018 verification competition, worked out using the VerCors verification toolset. Interestingly, these case studies are sequential, while VerCors specialises in reasoning about parallel and concurrent software. This paper elaborates on our experiences of using VerCors to verify sequential programs. The first case study involves specifying and verifying the behaviour of a gap buffer; a data-structure commonly used in text editors. The second case study involves verifying a combinatorial problem based on Project Euler problem #114. We find that VerCors is well capable of reasoning about sequential software, and that certain techniques to reason about concurrency can help to reason about sequential programs. However, the extra annotations required to reason about concurrency bring some specificational overhead.},
 author = {Joosten, Sebastiaan Jozef Christiaan and Wytse Oortwijn and Mohsen Safari and Marieke Huisman},
 bdsk-url-1 = {https://conf.researchr.org/track/FTfJP-2018/FTfJP-2018-papers},
 day = {16},
 language = {English},
 month = {7},
 title = {An Exercise in Verifying Sequential Programs with VerCors},
 url = {https://conf.researchr.org/track/FTfJP-2018/FTfJP-2018-papers},
 year = {2018}
}