Social processes and proofs of theorems and programs
Communications of the ACM
Comments on 'Defining Software by Continuous Smooth Functions' by R.A. De Millo and R.J. Lipton
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
PLDI '10 Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
Smoothing a program soundly and robustly
CAV'11 Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Computer aided verification
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A simple proof is given, showing that for every operational description of a software system expressed as a discrete state transition function on a virtual machine, there is a continuous smooth function on the reals that agrees with the state transition function on all legal states and has exactly the same complexity. It is suggested that an implication of this result is that there is no reason, in principle, that the methods of classical analysis cannot be used in software engineering.