Technology for inferring contracts from code
Abstract
Contracts are a simple yet very powerful form of specification. They consists of method preconditions and post-conditions, of object invariants, and of assertions and loop invariants. Ideally, the programmer will annotate all of her code with contracts which are mechanically checked by some static analysis tool. In practice, programmers only write few contracts, mainly preconditions and some object invariants. The reason for that is that other contracts are "clear from the code": Programmers do not like to repeat themselves. As a consequence, any usable static verification tool should provide some form of contract inference.
References
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P. Cousot, R. Cousot, M. Fähndrich, and F. Logozzo. Automatic inference of necessary preconditions. In VMCAI, pages 128--148, 2013.
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P. Cousot, R. Cousot, and F. Logozzo. Contract precondition inference from intermittent assertions on collections. In VMCAI'11, 2011.
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Index Terms
- Technology for inferring contracts from code
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Technology for inferring contracts from code
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POPL '17: Proceedings of the 44th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming LanguagesThis paper studies hybrid contract verification for an imperative higher-order language based on a so-called manifest contract system. In manifest contract systems, contracts are part of static types and contract verification is hybrid in the sense that ...
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November 2013
100 pages
December 201380 pages
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- SIGAPP: ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing
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Association for Computing Machinery
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Published: 10 November 2013
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HILT 2013
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HILT 2013: High Integrity Language Technology ACM SIGAda Annual
November 10 - 14, 2013
Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, USA
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HILT '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 9 of 17 submissions, 53%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 27 of 48 submissions, 56%
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