Statecharts: A visual formalism for complex systems
Science of Computer Programming
A Discipline of Programming
An Extended Static Checker for Modular-3
CC '98 Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Compiler Construction
PVS: A Prototype Verification System
CADE-11 Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Automated Deduction: Automated Deduction
Exception Handling with Multi-Exit Statements
Programmiersprachen und Programmentwicklung, 6. Fachtagung des Fachausschusses Programmiersprachen der GI
Techniques for program verification
Techniques for program verification
An overview of JML tools and applications
International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT) - Special section on formal methods for industrial critical systems
Tool Support for Invariant Based Programming
APSEC '05 Proceedings of the 12th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference
Chapter I: Notes on structured programming
Structured programming
Programming with Verification Conditions
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
The spec# programming system: an overview
CASSIS'04 Proceedings of the 2004 international conference on Construction and Analysis of Safe, Secure, and Interoperable Smart Devices
Testing and verifying invariant based programs in the SOCOS environment
TAP'07 Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Tests and proofs
Mechanical inference of invariants for FOR-loops
Journal of Symbolic Computation
Semantics and proof rules of invariant based programs
Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
Invited keynote talk invariant based programming
TFM'06 Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Teaching Formal Methods: practice and experience
Verifying invariant based programs in the SOCOS environment
TFM'06 Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Teaching Formal Methods: practice and experience
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Program verification is usually done by adding specifications and invariants to the program and then proving that the verification conditions are all true. This makes program verification an alternative to or a complement to testing. We study here an another approach to program construction, which we refer to as invariant based programming, where we start by formulating the specifications and the internal loop invariants for the program, before we write the program code itself. The correctness of the code is then easy to check at the same time as one is constructing it. In this approach, program verification becomes a complement to coding rather than to testing. The purpose is to produce programs and software that are correct by construction. We present a new kind of diagrams, nested invariant diagrams, where program specifications and invariants (rather than the control) provide the main organizing structure. Nesting of invariants provide an extension hierarchy that allows us to express the invariants in a very compact manner. We study the feasibility of formulating specifications and loop invariants before the code itself has been written. We propose that a systematic use of figures, in combination with a rough idea of the intended behavior of the algorithm, makes it rather straightforward to formulate the invariants needed for the program, to construct the code around these invariants and to check that the resulting program is indeed correct.