A refinement calculus for logic programs

  • Authors:

  • Ian Hayes;Robert Colvin;David Hemer;Paul Strooper;Ray Nickson

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Australia;School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Australia;School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Australia;School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Australia;School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

  • Venue:
  • Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Existing refinement calculi provide frameworks for the stepwise development of imperative programs from specifications. This paper presents a refinement calculus for deriving logic programs. The calculus contains a wide-spectrum logic programming language, including executable constructs such as sequential conjunction, disjunction, and existential quantification, as well as specification constructs such as general predicates, assumptions and universal quantification. A declarative semantics is defined for this wide-spectrum language based on executions. Executions are partial functions from states to states, where a state is represented as a set of bindings. The semantics is used to define the meaning of programs and specifications, including parameters and recursion. To complete the calculus, a notion of correctness-preserving refinement over programs in the wide-spectrum language is defined and refinement laws for developing programs are introduced. The refinement calculus is illustrated using example derivations and prototype tool support is discussed.