Abstraction and refinement for local reasoning

  • Authors:
  • Thomas Dinsdale-Young;Philippa Gardner;Mark Wheelhouse

  • Affiliations:
  • Imperial College London;Imperial College London;Imperial College London

  • Venue:
  • VSTTE'10 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Verified software: theories, tools, experiments
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Local reasoning has become a well-established technique in program verification, which has been shown to be useful at many different levels of abstraction. In separation logic, we use a low-level abstraction that is close to how the machine sees the program state. In context logic, we work with high-level abstractions that are close to how the clients of modules see the program state. We apply program refinement to local reasoning, demonstrating that high-level local reasoning is sound for module implementations. We consider two approaches: one that preserves the high-level locality at the low level; and one that breaks the high-level 'fiction' of locality.