Related papers: Programming Language Features for Refinement

This report presents the Dafny language and verifier, with a focus on describing the main features of the language, including pre- and postconditions, assertions, loop invariants, termination metrics, quantifiers, predicates and frames.…

Refinement types enrich a language's type system with logical predicates that circumscribe the set of values described by the type, thereby providing software developers a tunable knob with which to inform the type system about what…

Formal verification techniques aim at formally proving the correctness of a computer program with respect to a formal specification, but the expertise and effort required for applying formal specification and verification techniques and…

Verification-aware programming languages such as Dafny and F* provide means to formally specify and prove properties of a program. Although the problem of checking an implementation against a specification can be defined mechanically, there…

In recent years, program verifiers and interactive theorem provers have become more powerful and more suitable for verifying large programs or proofs. This has demonstrated the need for improving the user experience of these tools to…

Dependently typed programming languages allow sophisticated properties of data to be expressed within the type system. Of particular use in dependently typed programming are indexed types that refine data by computationally useful…

Refinement is one of the cornerstones of a formal approach to software engineering. Refinement is the process of developing a more detailed design or implementation from an abstract specification through a sequence of mathematically-based…

The majority of modern systems exhibit sophisticated concurrent behaviour, where several system components modify and observe the system state with fine-grained atomicity. Many systems (e.g., multi-core processors, real-time controllers)…

Modularity is the fundamental aspect of modern software engineering, however many advanced modularity techniques requires prospective technologies as part of development and operation process. In this paper, we present Refinable Function,…

This paper is a tutorial for newcomers to the field of automated verification tools, though we assume the reader to be relatively familiar with Hoare-style verification. In this paper, besides introducing the most basic features of the…

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…

Existing informal language-based (e.g., human language) Large Language Models (LLMs) trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL) face a significant challenge: their verification processes, which provide crucial training signals, are neither…

Formal software verification techniques are widely used to specify and prove the functional correctness of programs. However, nonfunctional properties such as time complexity are usually carried out with pen and paper. Inefficient code in…

The notion of refinement plays an important role in software engineering. It is the basis of a stepwise development methodology in which the correctness of a system can be established by proving, or computing, that a system refines its…

Formal verification has the potential to drastically reduce software bugs, but its high additional cost has hindered large-scale adoption. While Dafny presents a promise to significantly reduce the effort to write verified programs, users…

Dafny is a verification-aware programming language that comes with a compiler and static program verifier. However, neither the compiler nor the verifier is proved correct; in fact, soundness bugs have been found in both tools. This paper…

Stepwise refinement of algebraic specifications is a well known formal methodology for program development. However, traditional notions of refinement based on signature morphisms are often too rigid to capture a number of relevant…

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…

Dafny is a verification-aware programming language that allows developers to formally specify their programs and prove them correct. Currently, a Dafny program is compiled in two steps: First, a backend translates the input program to a…

Using large language models (LLMs) to generate source code from natural language prompts is a popular and promising idea with a wide range of applications. One of its limitations is that the generated code can be faulty at times, often in a…