Abstract
We propose a new static software analysis principle called Abstract Execution, generalizing Symbolic Execution: While the latter analyzes all possible execution paths of a specific program, Abstract Execution analyzes a partially unspecified program by permitting abstract symbols representing unknown contexts. For each abstract symbol, we faithfully represent each possible concrete execution resulting from its substitution with concrete code. There is a wide range of applications of Abstract Execution, especially for verifying relational properties of schematic programs. We implemented Abstract Execution in a deductive verification framework and proved correctness of eight well-known statement-level refactoring rules, including two with loops. For each refactoring we characterize the preconditions that make it semantics-preserving. Most preconditions are not mentioned in the literature.
This work was funded by the Hessian LOEWE initiative within the Software-Factory 4.0 project.
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Notes
- 1.
If the statement causes a split, like an
statement, we still can combine the arising sequents to a single one by state merging [27]. - 2.
It is possible that, for instance, during returning an exception is thrown: this simply means that exception is the reason for termination.
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Steinhöfel, D., Hähnle, R. (2019). Abstract Execution. In: ter Beek, M., McIver, A., Oliveira, J. (eds) Formal Methods – The Next 30 Years. FM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11800. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30942-8_20
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