Refinement-based verification for possibly-cyclic lists

  • Authors:
  • Alexey Loginov;Thomas Reps;Mooly Sagiv

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM T.J. Watson Research Center;Comp. Sci. Dept., University of Wisconsin;School of Comp. Sci., Tel-Aviv University

  • Venue:
  • Program analysis and compilation, theory and practice
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

In earlier work, we presented an abstraction-refinement mechanism that was successful in verifying automatically the partial correctness of in-situ list reversal when applied to an acyclic linked list [10]. This paper reports on the automatic verification of the total correctness (partial correctness and termination) of the same list-reversal algorithm, when applied to a possibly-cyclic linked list. A key contribution that made this result possible is an extension of the finite-differencing technique [14] to enable the maintenance of reachability information for a restricted class of possibly-cyclic data structures, which includes possibly-cyclic linked lists.