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From Rewriting Logic, to Programming Language Semantics, to Program Verification

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Logic, Rewriting, and Concurrency

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9200))

Abstract

Rewriting logic has proven to be an excellent formalism to define executable semantics of programming languages, concurrent or not, and then to derive formal analysis tools for the defined languages with very little effort, such as model checkers. In this paper we give an overview of recent results obtained in the context of the rewriting logic semantics framework \({\mathbb {K}}\), such as complete semantics of large programming languages like C, Java, JavaScript, Python, and deductive program verification techniques that allow us to verify programs in these languages using a common verification infrastructure.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The official test suite for Java implementations is the Java Compatibility Kit (JCK) from Oracle, which is not publicly available. Oracle offers free access for non-profit organizations willing to implement the whole JDK (http://openjdk.java.net/groups/conformance/JckAccess/), i.e., both the language and the class library. We applied and Oracle rejected our request, because we did not “implement” the complete Java library. Also, note that the NIST Juliet testsuite (http://samate.nist.gov/SARD/testsuite.php) is meant to asses the capability of Java static analysis tools, and not the completeness of Java implementations.

  2. 2.

    In mathematical mode, we prefer the notation \(\langle {...}\rangle _\mathsf{{k}}\) for cells instead of the XML-like notation \(\mathtt{<k>...</k> }\) preferred in ASCII.

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Roșu, G. (2015). From Rewriting Logic, to Programming Language Semantics, to Program Verification. In: Martí-Oliet, N., Ölveczky, P., Talcott, C. (eds) Logic, Rewriting, and Concurrency. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9200. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23165-5_28

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