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Related papers: Higher-Order Symbolic Execution via Contracts

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We present a new approach to automated reasoning about higher-order programs by endowing symbolic execution with a notion of higher-order, symbolic values. Our approach is sound and relatively complete with respect to a first-order solver…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2016-03-22 Phuc C. Nguyen , Sam Tobin-Hochstadt , David Van Horn

Behavioral software contracts are a widely used mechanism for governing the flow of values between components. However, run-time monitoring and enforcement of contracts imposes significant overhead and delays discovery of faulty components…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2014-06-17 Phuc C. Nguyen , Sam Tobin-Hochstadt , David Van Horn

Software contracts allow programmers to state rich program properties using the full expressive power of an object language. However, since they are enforced at runtime, monitoring contracts imposes significant overhead and delays error…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2017-11-13 Phuc C. Nguyen , Thomas Gilray , Sam Tobin-Hochstadt , David Van Horn

We present a framework for symbolically executing and model checking higher-order programs with external (open) methods. We focus on the client-library paradigm and in particular we aim to check libraries with respect to any definable…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-02-24 Yu-Yang Lin , Nikos Tzevelekos

Contracts specifying a procedure's behavior in terms of pre- and postconditions are essential for scalable software verification, but cannot express any constraints on the events occurring during execution of the procedure. This…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Richard Bubel , Dilian Gurov , Reiner Hähnle , Marco Scaletta

Symbolic execution is a powerful technique for program analysis. However, it has many limitations in practical applicability: the path explosion problem encumbers scalability, the need for language-specific implementation, the inability to…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2018-07-03 Shiqi Shen , Soundarya Ramesh , Shweta Shinde , Abhik Roychoudhury , Prateek Saxena

Given a natural language instruction and an input scene, our goal is to train a model to output a manipulation program that can be executed by the robot. Prior approaches for this task possess one of the following limitations: (i) rely on…

Synthesizing programs from examples requires searching over a vast, combinatorial space of possible programs. In this search process, a key challenge is representing the behavior of a partially written program before it can be executed, to…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Maxwell Nye , Yewen Pu , Matthew Bowers , Jacob Andreas , Joshua B. Tenenbaum , Armando Solar-Lezama

The focus of these lecture notes is on abstract models and basic ideas and results that relate to the operational semantics of programming languages largely conceived. The approach is to start with an abstract description of the computation…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Roberto M. Amadio

Symbolic execution is a classical program analysis technique used to show that programs satisfy or violate given specifications. In this work we generalize symbolic execution to support program analysis for relational specifications in the…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-08-05 Gian Pietro Farina , Stephen Chong , Marco Gaboardi

Symbolic execution is a powerful program analysis technique that allows for the systematic exploration of all program paths. Path explosion, where the number of states to track becomes unwieldy, is one of the biggest challenges hindering…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Joshua Bailey , Charles Nicholas

Automatically generating formal specifications including loop invariants, preconditions, and postconditions for legacy code is critical for program understanding, reuse and verification. However, the inherent complexity of control and data…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Fanpeng Yang , Xu Ma , Shuling Wang , Xiong Xu , Qinxiang Cao , Naijun Zhan , Xiaofeng Li , Bin Gu

Predictive models are fundamental to engineering reliable software systems. However, designing conservative, computable approximations for the behavior of programs (static analyses) remains a difficult and error-prone process for modern…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2011-05-10 David Van Horn , Matthew Might

Control flow in unstructured programs can be complex and dynamic, which makes static analysis difficult. Yet, automated reasoning about unstructured control flow is important when certifying properties of binary (machine) code in…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Andreas Lindner , Karl Palmskog , Scott Constable , Mads Dam , Roberto Guanciale , Hamed Nemati

The idea of using unfolding as a way of computing a program semantics has been applied successfully to logic programs and has shown itself a powerful tool that provides concrete, implementable results, as its outcome is actually source…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2017-08-29 José María Rey-Poza , Julio Mariño-Carballo

We propose a general framework to allow: (a) specifying the operational semantics of a programming language; and (b) stating and proving properties about program correctness. Our framework is based on a many-sorted system of hybrid modal…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Ioana Leustean , Natalia Moanga , Traian Florin Serbanuta

Semantic parsing aims at translating natural language (NL) utterances onto machine-interpretable programs, which can be executed against a real-world environment. The expensive annotation of utterance-program pairs has long been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Bailin Wang , Mirella Lapata , Ivan Titov

We present a semantics based framework for analysing the quantitative behaviour of programs with regard to resource usage. We start from an operational semantics equipped with costs. The dioid structure of the set of costs allows for…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2010-06-29 David Cachera , Arnaud Jobin

Describing systems in terms of choices and their resulting costs and rewards offers the promise of freeing algorithm designers and programmers from specifying how those choices should be made; in implementations, the choices can be realized…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Martin Abadi , Gordon Plotkin

We propose a purely extensional semantics for higher-order logic programming. In this semantics program predicates denote sets of ordered tuples, and two predicates are equal iff they are equal as sets. Moreover, every program has a unique…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2011-06-20 A. Charalambidis , K. Handjopoulos , P. Rondogiannis , W. W. Wadge
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