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Incorrectness Proofs for Object-Oriented Programs via Subclass Reflection

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Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14405))

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Abstract

Inheritance and method overriding are crucial concepts in object-oriented programming (OOP) languages. These concepts support a hierarchy of classes that reuse common data and methods. Most existing works for OO verification focus on modular reasoning in which they could support dynamic dispatching and thus efficiently enforce the Liskov substitution principle on behavioural subtyping. They are based on \(superclass\ abstraction\) to reason about the correctness of OO programs. However, techniques to reason about the incorrectness of OOP are yet to be investigated.

In this paper, we present a mechanism that 1) specifies the normal and abnormal executions of OO programs by using specifications and specifications respectively; 2) verifies these specifications by a novel under-approximation proof system based on incorrectness logic that can support dynamic modularity. We introduce subclass reflection with dynamic views and an adapted subtyping relation for under-approximation. Our proposal can deal with both OOP aspects (e.g., behavioural subtyping and casting) and under-approximation aspects (e.g., dropping paths). To demonstrate how the proposed proof system can soundly verify the specifications, we prove its soundness, prototype the proof system, and report on experimental results. The results show that our system can precisely reason about the incorrectness of programs with OOP aspects, such as proving the presence of casting errors and null-pointer-exceptions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This definition is slightly different from the version in Definition 2 for simplicity.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their comments. This work was partially supported by a Singapore Ministry of Education (MoE) Tier3 grant “Automated Program Repair”, MOE-MOET32021-0001.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Wenhua Li, Yahui Song & Wei-Ngan Chin

  2. University College London, London, UK

    Quang Loc Le

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  1. Wenhua Li
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  3. Yahui Song
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Correspondence to Wenhua Li .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Chung-Kil Hur

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Li, W., Le, Q.L., Song, Y., Chin, WN. (2023). Incorrectness Proofs for Object-Oriented Programs via Subclass Reflection. In: Hur, CK. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14405. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8311-7_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8311-7_13

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-99-8311-7

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