On Soundness of Verification for Software with Functional Semantics and Abstract Data Types

A threat to the soundness of modular verification systems arises from the following combination of specification and programming language features: a semantics in which the denotation of every pro- gram operation is a mathematical function, the opportunity to write re- lational specifications for program operations, and support for abstract data types. There is no apparent practical workaround for this problem short of changing one of these features. After accounting for software en- gineering considerations, the recommendation is to relax the first one and to restrict the second, i.e., (1) to partition program operations into "func- tion" operations and "procedure" operations; (2) to define the language semantics so the meaning of each function operation is a mathematical function, and to permit only a functional specification for a function op- eration; and (3) to define the language semantics so the meaning of each procedure operation is a mathematical relation, and to permit either a functional or a relational specification for a procedure operation.

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