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ENTCS
2006

A Compositional Natural Semantics and Hoare Logic for Low-Level Languages

13 years 3 months ago
A Compositional Natural Semantics and Hoare Logic for Low-Level Languages
The advent of proof-carrying code has generated significant interest in reasoning about low-level languages. It is widely believed that low-level languages with jumps must be difficult to reason about by being inherently non-modular. We argue that this is untrue. We take it seriously that, differently from statements of a high-level language, pieces of low-level code are multiple-entry and multiple-exit. And we define a piece of code to consist of either a single labelled instruction or a finite union of pieces of code. Thus we obtain a compositional natural semantics and a matching Hoare logic for a basic low-level language with jumps. By their simplicity and intuitiveness, these are comparable to the standard natural semantics and Hoare logic of While. The Hoare logic is sound and complete wrt. the semantics and allows for compilation of proofs of the Hoare logic of While.
Ando Saabas, Tarmo Uustalu
Added 12 Dec 2010
Updated 12 Dec 2010
Type Journal
Year 2006
Where ENTCS
Authors Ando Saabas, Tarmo Uustalu
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