Correctness of data representations involving heap data structures

  • Authors:
  • Uday S. Reddy;Hongseok Yang

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, United Kingdom;Micros Research Center, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 305-701, South Korea

  • Venue:
  • Science of Computer Programming - Special issue on 12th European symposium on programming (ESOP 2003)
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

While the semantics of local variables in programming languages is by now well-understood, the semantics of pointer-addressed heap variables is still an outstanding issue. In particular, the commonly assumed relational reasoning principles for data representations have not been validated in a semantic model of heap variables. In this paper, we define a parametricity semantics for a Pascal-like language with pointers and heap variables which gives such reasoning principles. It turns out that the correspondences between data representations cannot simply be relations between states, but more intricate correspondences that also need to keep track of visible locations whose pointers can be stored and leaked.