LCLint: a tool for using specifications to check code

Authors:
David Evans;John Guttag;James Horning;Yang Meng Tan
Affiliations:
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, and are supported in part by ARPA;MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, and are supported in part by ARPA;James Horning can be reachedat the DEC Systems Research Center;MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, and are supported in part by ARPA
Venue:
SIGSOFT '94 Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGSOFT symposium on Foundations of software engineering
Year:
1994

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Abstract

This paper describes LCLint, an efficient and flexible tool that accepts as input programs (written in ANSI C) and various levels of formal specification. Using this information, LCLint reports inconsistencies between a program and its specification. We also describe our experience using LCLint to help understand, document, and re-engineer legacy code.