Machine-Checking the Java Specification: Proving Type-Safety

  • Authors:
  • David von Oheimb;Tobias Nipkow

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • Formal Syntax and Semantics of Java
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

In this article we present Bali, the formalization of a large (hitherto sequential) sublanguage of Java. We give its abstract syntax, type system, well-formedness conditions, and an operational evaluation semantics. Based on these definitions, we can express soundness of the type system, an important design goal claimed to be reached by the designers of Java, and prove that Bali is indeed type-safe. All definitions and proofs have been done formally in the theorem prover Isabelle/HOL. Thus this article demonstrates that machine-checking the design of non-trivial programming languages has become a reality.