Inductive methods for proving properties of programs

  • Authors:

  • Zohar Manna;Stephen Ness;Jean Vuillemin

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, California;Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, California;Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, California

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of ACM conference on Proving assertions about programs
  • Year:
  • 1972

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Abstract

We have two main purposes in this paper. First, we clarify and extend known results about computation of recursive programs, emphasizing the difference between the theoretical and practical approaches. Secondly, we present and examine various known methods for proving properties of recursive programs. We discuss in detail two powerful inductive methods, computational induction and structural induction, illustrating their applications by various examples. We also briefly discuss some other related methods. Our aim in this work is to introduce inductive methods to as wide a class of readers as possible and to demonstrate their power as practical techniques. We ask the forgiveness of our more theoretical-minded colleagues for our occasional choice of clarity over precision.