Towards Symbolic Execution in Erlang

A Proof Assistant Based Formalisation of a Subset of Sequential Core Erlang

“…This alone would provide a solid motivation for the work presented in this paper, but our ultimate goal is to prove refactoring-related theorems, such as program equivalences, in the Coq Proof Assistant, based on this semantics. We have reviewed the extensive related work on formalisations of both Erlang [6,7,9,18] and Core Erlang [5, 8, 11-13, 15, 16], incorporating ideas from these sources as appropriate.…”

“…[11] describes function applications only for named functions. There is another notable difference in the existing formalisations from the syntactic point of view: some define values as a subclass of expressions by representing them as a distinct syntactic category [6,7,15,18], while others define values as "ground patterns" [11][12][13]16], that is as a subset of patterns. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages, and we discuss this question in more detail in Section 3.…”

“…As mentioned in Section 2, our expression syntax is very similar to the existing definitions found in the related work. The main abstractions are based on Fredlund and Vidal's work [6,7,18] and the additional expressions (e.g. let, letrec, apply, call) on the Core Erlang specification [4] as well as work by Lanese, Neuhäußer, Nishida and their co-authors [11-13, 15, 16].…”

“…al. [6,7,15,18]. Moreover, there are two main approach to define the aforementioned relation of values and expressions or patterns:…”

“…-Values are not a distinct syntactic category, so they are defined with an explicit subset relation; -Values are syntactically distinct, and there is no explicit subset relation between values and expressions or patterns [6,7,15,18].…”