Separation Logic to Meliorate Software Testing and Validation

Abstract

The ideal goal of any program logic is to develop logically correct programs without the need for predominant debugging. Separation logic is considered to be an effective program logic for proving programs that involve pointers. Reasoning with pointers becomes difficult especially due to the way they interfere with the modular style of program development. For instance, often there is aliasing arising due to several pointers to a given cell location. In such situations, any alteration to that cell in one of the program modules may affect the values of many syntactically unrelated expressions in other modules. In this chapter, we try to explore these difficulties through some simple examples and introduce the notion of separating conjunction as a tool to deal with it. We introduce separation logic as an extension of Hoare Logic using a programming language that has four pointer-manipulating commands. These commands perform the usual heap operations such as lookup, update, allocation and de-allocation. The new set of assertions and axioms of separation logic are presented in a semi-formal style. Examples are given to illustrate unique features of the new assertions and axioms. Finally, the chapter concludes with proofs of some real programs using the axioms of separation logic.