Abstract

Shape analysis is a promising technique for statically verifying and extracting properties of programs that manipulate complex data structures. We introduce a new characterization of constraints that arise in parametric shape analysis based on manipulation of three-valued structures as dataflow facts. We identify an interesting syntactic class of first-order logic formulas that captures the meaning of three-valued structures under concretization. This class is broader than previously introduced classes, allowing for a greater flexibility in the formulation of shape analysis constraints in program annotations and internal analysis representations. Three-valued structures can be viewed as one possible normal form of the formulas in our class. Moreover, we characterize the meaning of three-valued structures under "tight concretization". We show that the seemingly minor change from concretization to tight concretization increases the expressive power of three-valued structures in such a way that the resulting constraints are closed under all boolean operations. We call the resulting constraints boolean shape analysis constraints. The main technical contribution of this paper is a natural syntactic characterization of boolean shape analysis constraints as arbitrary boolean combinations of first-order sentences of certain form, and an algorithm for transforming such boolean combinations into the normal form that corresponds directly to three-valued structures.

Citations