Abstract

1 Introduction It is well known that it is undecidable in general whether a given program meets its specification. In contrast, it can be checked easily by a machine whether a formal proof is correct, and from a constructive proof one can automatically extract a corresponding program, which by its very construction is correct as well. This- at least in principle- opens a way to produce correct software, e.g. for safety-critical applications. Moreover, programs obtained from proofs are "commented " in a rather extreme sense. Therefore it is easy to maintain them, and also to adapt them to particular situations. We will concentrate on the question of classical versus constructive proofs. It is known that any classical proof of a specification of the form 8x9yB with B quantifier-free can be transformed into a constructive proof of the same formula. However, when it comes to extraction of a program from a proof obtained in this way, one easily ends up with a mess. Therefore, some refinements of the standard transformation are necessary.

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