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Advice on structuring compilers and proving them correct

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F. Lockwood MorrisAuthors Info & Claims

POPL '73: Proceedings of the 1st annual ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages

October 1973

Pages 144 - 152

https://doi.org/10.1145/512927.512941

Published: 01 October 1973 Publication History

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to advise an approach (and to support that advice by discussion of an example) towards achieving a goal first announced by John McCarthy: that compilers for higher-level programming languages should be made completely trustworthy by proving their correctness. The author believes that the compiler-correctness problem can be made much less general and better-structured than the unrestricted program-correctness problem; to do so will of course entail restricting what a compiler may be.

References

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G. Birkhoff and J. D. Lipson, "Heterogeneous Algebras", J. Combinatorial Theory 8, pp. 115-133 (1970).

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R. M. Burstall and P. J. Landin, "Programs and Their Proofs: an Algebraic Approach", Machine Intelligence 4 (1969).

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D. Scott and C. Strachey, "Towards a Mathematical Semantics for Computer Languages", Programming Research Group Monograph PRG-6, Oxford Computing Laboratory (1971).

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P. J. Landin, "A Program-Machine Symmetric Automata Theory", Machine Intelligence 5 (1970).

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F. L. Morris, "Correctness of Translations of Programming Languages", Stanford Computer Science Memo CS 72-303 (1972).

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R. Milner and R. Weyhrauch, "Proving Compiler Correctness in a Mechanized Logic", Machine Intelligence 7 (1972).

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P. Hitchcock and D. Park, "Induction Rules and Proofs of Termination", Proc. Colloques IRIA Theorie des automates des langages et de la Programmation. Rocquencourt, France, July 1972.

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POPL '73: Proceedings of the 1st annual ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages

October 1973

242 pages

ISBN:9781450373494

DOI:10.1145/512927

Conference Chair:
Patrick C. Fischer
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
,
Program Chair:
Jeffrey D. Ullman
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 October 1973

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POPL '73 Paper Acceptance Rate 22 of 100 submissions, 22%;

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Rodríguez LPagano MFridlender D(2016)Proving Correctness of a Compiler Using Step-indexed Logical RelationsElectronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)10.1016/j.entcs.2016.06.013323:C(197-214)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2016
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