Related papers: Modular Compilation of a Synchronous Language
Formal methods for software correctness are critical to the future of software engineering - and so must be an essential part of software engineering education. Unfortunately, formal methods are often resisted by students due to perceived…
Logical frameworks are meta-formalisms in which the syntax and semantics of object logics and related formal systems can be defined. This allows object logics to inherit implementations from the framework including, e.g., parser, type…
Operational semantics has established itself as a flexible but rigorous means to describe the meaning of programming languages. Oftentimes, it is felt necessary to keep a semantics small, for example to facilitate its use for model checking…
Traditionally, practitioners use formal methods pre-dominately for one half of the quality-assurance process: verification (do we build the software right?). The other half -- validation (do we build the right software?) -- has been given…
Formal methods apply algorithms based on mathematical principles to enhance the reliability of systems. It would only be natural to try to progress from verification, model checking or testing a system against its formal specification into…
Fully automated verification of large-scale software and hardware systems is arguably the holy grail of formal methods. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated their potential for enhancing the degree of automation in formal…
A syntactic model is presented for the specification of finite-state synchronous digital logic systems with complex input/output interfaces, which control the flow of data between opaque computational elements, and for the composition of…
This paper presents a focused literature survey on the use of large language models (LLM) to assist in writing formal specifications for software. A summary of thirty-five key papers is presented, including examples for specifying programs…
Formal Methods (FMs) are currently essential for verifying the safety and reliability of software systems. However, the specification writing in formal methods tends to be complex and challenging to learn, requiring familiarity with various…
The goal of this paper is to help mainstream programmers routinely use formal verification on their smart contracts by 1) proposing a new YAML-format for writing general-purpose formal specifications, 2) demonstrating how a formal…
Nowadays, formal methods are used in various areas for the verification of programs or for code generation from models in order to increase the quality of software and to reduce costs. However, there are still fields in which formal methods…
Verifying specifications for large-scale modern engineering systems can be a time-consuming task, as most formal verification methods are limited to systems of modest size. Recently, contract-based design and verification has been proposed…
For years, Integrated Development Environments have demonstrated their usefulness in order to ease the development of software. High-level security or safety systems require proofs of compliance to standards, based on analyses such as code…
Formal specification is a basis for rigorous software implementation. VDM-SL is a formal specification language with an extensive executable subset. Successful cases of VDM-family including VDM-SL have shown that producing a well-tested…
Testing has become an indispensable activity of software development, yet writing good and relevant tests remains a quite challenging task. One well-known problem is that it often is impossible or unrealistic to test for every outcome, as…
A desired but challenging property of compiler verification is compositionality, in the sense that the compilation correctness of a program can be deduced incrementally from that of its substructures ranging from statements, functions, and…
The Unified Modelling Language is emerging as a de-facto standard for modelling object-oriented systems. However, the semantics document that a part of the standard definition primarily provides a description of the language's syntax and…
Modular reasoning about class invariants is challenging in the presence of dependencies among collaborating objects that need to maintain global consistency. This paper presents semantic collaboration: a novel methodology to specify and…
We present \synver{}, a novel synthesis and verification framework for C programs, that deploys a Large Language Model (LLM) to search for a candidate program that satisfies the given specification. Our key idea is to impose syntactic and…
Transformation approaches for automatically constructing analysis models from textual requirements are critical to software development, as they can bring forward the use of precise formal languages from the coding phase to the requirement…