Abstract
Reasoning about object-oriented programs requires an appropriate technique to reflect a fundamental “general relativity” property of the approach: every operation is relative to a current object, which changes with every qualified call; such a call needs access to the context of the client object. The notion of negative variable, discussed in this article, provides a framework for reasoning about OO programs in any semantic framework. We introduce a fundamental rule describing the semantics of object-oriented calls, its specific versions for such frameworks as axiomatic (Hoare-style) logic and denotational semantics, and its application to such problems as alias analysis and the consistency of concurrent programs. The approach has been implemented as part of a verification environment for a major object-oriented language and used to perform a number of proofs and analyses.
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Meyer, B., Kogtenkov, A. (2014). Negative Variables and the Essence of Object-Oriented Programming. In: Iida, S., Meseguer, J., Ogata, K. (eds) Specification, Algebra, and Software. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8373. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54624-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54624-2_9
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