During deductive verification of programs written in imperative languages, the generation and proof of verification conditions corresponding to loops can cause difficulties, because each one must be provided with an invariant whose construction is often a challenge. As a rule, the methods of invariant synthesis are heuristic ones. This impedes its application. An alternative is the symbolic method of loop invariant elimination suggested by V.A. Nepomniaschy in 2005. Its idea is to represent a loop body in a form of special replacement operation under certain constraints. This operation expresses loop effect in a symbolic form and allows to introduce an inference rule which uses no invariants in axiomatic semantics. This work represents the further development of this method. It extends the mixed axiomatic semantics method suggested for C-light program verification. This extension includes the verification method of iterations over changeable arrays possibly with loop exit in C-light programs. The method contains the inference rule for iterations without loop invariants. This rule was implemented in verification conditions generator which is a part of the automated system of C-light program verification. To prove verification conditions automatically in ACL2, two algorithms were developed and implemented. The first one automatically generates the replacement operation in ACL2 language, the second one automatically generates auxiliary lemmas which allow to prove the obtained verification conditions in ACL2 successfully in automatic mode. An example which illustrates the application of the mentioned methods is described.
The C-program verification is an urgent problem of modern programming. To apply known methods of deductive verification it is necessary to provide loop invariants which might be a challenge in many cases. In this paper we consider the C-light language [18] which is a powerful subset of the ISO C language. To verify C-light programs the two-level approach [19,20] and the mixed axiomatic semantics method [1,3,11] were suggested. At the first stage, we translate [17] the source C-light program into Ckernel one. The C-kernel language [19] is a subset of C-light. The theorem of translation correctness was proved in [10,11]. The C-kernel has less statements with respect to the C-light, this allows to decrease the number of inference rules of axiomatic semantics during its development. At the second stage of this approach, the verification conditions are generated by applying the rules of mixed axiomatic semantics [10, 11] which could contain several rules for the same program statement. In such cases the inference rules are applied depending on the context. Let us note that application of the mixed axiomatic semantics allows to significantly simplify verification conditions in many cases. This article represents an extension of this approach which includes our verification method for definite iteration over unchangeable data structures without loop exit in C-light programs. The method contains a new inference rule for the deifinite iteration without invariants. This rule was implemented in verification conditions generator. At the proof stage the SMT-solver Z3 [12] is used. An example which illustrates the application of this technique is considered.The article is published in the authors' wording.
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