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Teaching Deductive Verification in Why3 to Undergraduate Students

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Formal Methods Teaching (FMTea 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11758))

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Abstract

We present the contents of a new formal methods course taught to undergraduate students in their third year at the University of Rennes 1 in France. This course aims at initiating students to formal methods, using the Why3 platform for deductive verification. It exposes students to several techniques, ranging from testing specifications, designing loop invariants, building adequate data structures and their type invariants, to the use of ghost code. At the end of the course, most of the students were able to prove correct in an automated way non-trivial sorting algorithms, as well as standard recursive algorithms on binary search trees.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Delphine Demange and Alan Schmitt for their active participation and their help to prepare this course. The author is grateful to the Why3 development team for its helpful answers, and to Léon Gondelman who convinced her to write this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Univ Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA, Rennes, France

    Sandrine Blazy

Authors
  1. Sandrine Blazy
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Correspondence to Sandrine Blazy .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Brijesh Dongol

  2. Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland

    Luigia Petre

  3. The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Graeme Smith

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Blazy, S. (2019). Teaching Deductive Verification in Why3 to Undergraduate Students. In: Dongol, B., Petre, L., Smith, G. (eds) Formal Methods Teaching. FMTea 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11758. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32441-4_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32441-4_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-32440-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-32441-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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