A characterization of Hoare's logic for programs with Pascal-like procedures

Authors:
Ernst-Rüdiger Olderog
Affiliations:
-
Venue:
STOC '83 Proceedings of the fifteenth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Year:
1983

Citing 7
Cited 2

Even Simple Programs Are Hard To Analyze

Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Programming Language Constructs for Which It Is Impossible To Obtain Good Hoare Axiom Systems

Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Ten Years of Hoare's Logic: A Survey—Part I

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
An axiomatic basis for computer programming

Communications of the ACM
A Discipline of Programming

A Discipline of Programming
PASCAL user manual and report

PASCAL user manual and report
Present-Day Hoare-Like Systems for Programming Languages with Procedures: Power, Limits and most Likely Expressions

Proceedings of the 7th Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming

Towards fully abstract semantics for local variables

POPL '88 Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
An observationally complete program logic for imperative higher-order functions

Theoretical Computer Science

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper presents a new characterization of applicability and limitations of Hoare's logic. We consider a programming language LPas consisting of nondeterministic programs with a Pascal-like procedure concept and prove as our main theorem: Admissible sublanguages L of LPas have a sound and relatively complete Hoare logic if and only if all programs in L have regular formal call trees. Moreover, we present an explicit Hoare calculus for L whenever such a Hoare logic exists. Our theorem generalizes Clarke's results on completeness and incompleteness for languages with procedures [Cl 79] and improves Lipton's characterization of Hoare's logic which cannot deal with nondeterminism and does not provide explicit calculi [Li 77].