Related papers: The role of logical interpretations in program dev…
Existing refinement calculi provide frameworks for the stepwise development of imperative programs from specifications. This paper presents a refinement calculus for deriving logic programs. The calculus contains a wide-spectrum logic…
Refinement transforms an abstract system model into a concrete, executable program, such that properties established for the abstract model carry over to the concrete implementation. Refinement has been used successfully in the development…
This paper aims at integrating heterogeneous documents used in pragmatic software develpoment methods to describe views with a formal refinement based software development process. Therefore we propose an integrated semantics of…
Formal specification techniques allow expressing idealized specifications, which abstract from restrictions that may arise in implementations. However, partial implementations are universal in software development due to practical…
Recent work by (Richardson and Kuhn, 2017a,b; Richardson et al., 2018) looks at semantic parser induction and question answering in the domain of source code libraries and APIs. In this brief note, we formalize the representations being…
Model-driven design of software for safety-critical applications often relies on mathematically grounded techniques such as the B method. Such techniques consist in the successive applications of refinements to derive a concrete…
Formal verification via theorem proving enables the expressive specification and rigorous proof of software correctness, but it is difficult to scale due to the significant manual effort and expertise required. While Large Language Models…
Logic programming is a flexible programming paradigm due to the use of predicates without a fixed data flow. To extend logic languages with the compact notation of functional programming, there are various proposals to map evaluable…
Logic has proved essential for formally modeling software based systems. Such formal descriptions, frequently called specifications, have served not only as requirements documentation and formalisation, but also for providing the…
The refinement calculus for logic programs is a framework for deriving logic programs from specifications. It is based on a wide-spectrum language that can express both specifications and code, and a refinement relation that models the…
We present Executable Abstract Programs and analyse their role for software development and documentation. The intuitive understanding of these programs fits the computational mindset of software system engineers and is supported by a…
The complexity of modern software systems entails the need for reconfiguration mechanisms gov- erning the dynamic evolution of their execution configurations in response to both external stimulus or internal performance measures. Formally,…
In the refinement calculus, monotonic predicate transformers are used to model specifications for (imperative) programs. Together with a natural notion of simulation, they form a category enjoying many algebraic properties. We build on this…
We study transformational program logics for correctness and incorrectness that we extend to explicitly handle both termination and nontermination. We show that the logics are abstract interpretations of the right image transformer for a…
We present a novel approach to construction of a formal semantics for a programming language. Our approach, using a parametric denotational semantics, allows the semantics to be easily extended to support new language features, and…
We introduce a new application for inductive logic programming: learning the semantics of programming languages from example evaluations. In this short paper, we explored a simplified task in this domain using the Metagol meta-interpretive…
Logical specifications are widely used to represent software systems and their desired properties. Under system degradation or environmental changes, commonly seen in complex real-world robotic systems, these properties may no longer hold…
In this paper we examine the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex reasoning tasks. Although recent works have started to employ formal languages as an intermediate representation for reasoning tasks, they often face…
The draft paper defines a system, which is capable of maintaining bases of test cases for logical specifications. The specifications, which are subject to this system are transformed from their original shape in first-order logic to…
Formal specifications play a pivotal role in accurately characterizing program behaviors and ensuring software correctness. In recent years, leveraging large language models (LLMs) for the automatic generation of program specifications has…