Abstract

Bornat has recently described an approach to reasoning about pointers, building on work of Morris. Here we describe a semantics that validates the approach, and use it to help devise axioms for operations that allocate and dispose of memory. 1. INTRODUCTION It is widely acknowledged that pointers cause problems for program-proving formalisms (e.g. [8, 17, 13, 16, 9, 1, 14, 7]), but there is less agreement on precisely what the problems are. So, before describing our own work, we rst discuss where we believe the diculties lie. The rst issue that must be faced is aliasing , where distinct expressions can denote the same l-value. The problem here can be seen by reference to Hoare logic, where assignment is treated using substitution on the object-language level: fP [E=x]g x := E fPg: For this treatment of assignment to be sound it is necessary that dierent identiers are not aliases. With pointers the problem is that aliasing is not an exceptional circumstance: for example, it wi...

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