Cyclic proofs of program termination in separation logic. Forthcoming

Cyclic proofs of program termination in separation logic. Forthcoming

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by James Brotherston

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Datum	Value	Source
TITLE	Cyclic proofs of program termination in separation logic. Forthcoming	INFERENCE
AUTHOR NAME	James Brotherston	SVM HeaderParse 0.2
AUTHOR AFFIL	Imperial College, London, UK	SVM HeaderParse 0.2
ABSTRACT	We propose a novel approach to proving the termination of heapmanipulating programs, which combines separation logic with cyclic proof within a Hoare-style proof system. Judgements in this system express (guaranteed) termination of the program when started from a given line in the program and in a state satisfying a given precondition, which is expressed as a formula of separation logic. The proof rules of our system are of two types: logical rules that operate on preconditions; and symbolic execution rules that capture the effect of executing program commands. Our logical preconditions employ inductively defined predicates to describe heap properties, and proofs in our system are cyclic proofs: cyclic derivations in which some inductive predicate is unfolded infinitely often along every infinite path, thus allowing us to discard all infinite paths in the proof by an infinite descent argument. Moreover, the use of this soundness condition enables us to avoid the explicit construction and use of ranking functions for termination. We also give a completeness result for our system, which is relative in that it relies upon completeness of a proof system for logical implications in separation logic. We give examples illustrating our approach, including one example for which the corresponding ranking function is non-obvious: termination of the classical algorithm for in-place reversal of a (possibly cyclic) linked list.	SVM HeaderParse 0.2
CITATIONS	22 found	ParsCit 1.0