Abstract

The close relationship between writing programs and proving theorems has frequently been cited as an advantage of functional programming languages. We illustrate the interplay between programming and proving in the development of a program for regular expression matching. The presentation is inspired byLakatos's method of proofs and refutations in which the attempt to prove a plausible conjecture leads to a revision not only of the proof, but of the theorem itself. We give a plausible implementation of a regular expression matcher that contains a flaw that is uncovered in an attempt to prove its correctness. The failure of the proof suggests a revision of the specification, rather than a change to the code. We then show that a program meeting the revised specification is nevertheless sufficient to solve the original problem.

Citations

95	Proofs and Refutations - Lakatos - 1976
86	From regular expressions to deterministic automata - Berry, Sethi - 1986