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Traits: Correctness-by-Construction for Free

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Formal Techniques for Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems (FORTE 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13273))

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Abstract

We demonstrate that traits are a natural way to support correctness-by-construction (CbC) in an existing programming language in the presence of traditional post-hoc verification (PhV). With Correctness-by-Construction, programs are constructed incrementally along with a specification that is inherently guaranteed to be satisfied. CbC is complex to use without specialized tool support, since it needs a set of refinement rules of fixed granularity which are additional rules on top of the programming language.

In this work, we propose TraitCbC, an incremental program construction procedure that implements correctness-by-construction on the basis of PhV by using traits. TraitCbC enables program construction by trait composition instead of refinement rules. It provides a programming guideline, which similar to CbC should lead to well-structured programs, and allows flexible reuse of verified program building blocks. We introduce TraitCbC formally and prove the soundness of our verification strategy. Additionally, we implement TraitCbC as a proof of concept.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The approach should not be confused with other CbC approaches such as CbyC of Hall and Chapman [24]. CbyC is a software development process that uses formal modeling techniques and analysis for various stages of development (architectural design, detailed design, code) to detect and eliminate defects as early as possible [13]. We also exclude data refinement from abstract data types to concrete ones during code generation as for example in Isabelle/HOL [23].

  2. 2.

    The term trait has been used by many programming languages: Java interfaces with default methods are a good approximation for what has been called trait in the literature, while Scala traits are mixins [21], and Rust traits are type classes [46].

  3. 3.

    The methods could also be implemented in one trait.

  4. 4.

    Tool and evaluation at https://github.com/TUBS-ISF/CorC/tree/TraitCbC.

  5. 5.

    For example, Dafny approximately checks that the functions used in a specification form an acyclic graph.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. TU Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

    Tobias Runge & Ina Schaefer

  2. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Tobias Runge & Ina Schaefer

  3. Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Alex Potanin

  4. University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany

    Thomas Thüm

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  1. Tobias Runge
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  4. Ina Schaefer
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Correspondence to Tobias Runge , Alex Potanin , Thomas Thüm or Ina Schaefer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. King's College London, London, UK

    Mohammad Reza Mousavi

  2. University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Anna Philippou

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Runge, T., Potanin, A., Thüm, T., Schaefer, I. (2022). Traits: Correctness-by-Construction for Free. In: Mousavi, M.R., Philippou, A. (eds) Formal Techniques for Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems. FORTE 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13273. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08679-3_9

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