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Rules of inference for procedure calls

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Summary

The semantics of procedures and parameters were formalized by Hoare [2] in terms of axioms and rules of inference. Igarashi et al. [4] reformulated Hoare's system. This paper extends their rule of inference for procedure calls to allow

  1. i)

    actual variable parameters to occur in actual value parameters;

  2. ii)

    the body of a procedure to contain global variables that do not occur in assignment positions;

  3. iii)

    post-conditions and “internal” assertions of a procedure to refer to the initial values of variable parameters.

None of these are allowed in Hoare's system or the system of Igarashi, London and Luckham. An attractive feature of these extensions is that they do not increase the complexity of the rules of inference.

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References

  1. Hoare, C.A.R.: An axiomatic basis for computer programming. Comm. ACM 12, 576–581 (1969)

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  2. Hoare, C.A.R.: Procedures and parameters: An axiomatic approach. In: Symposium on semantics of algorithmic languages (E. Engler, ed.), Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Vol. 188, pp. 102–116. Berlin-Heidelberg-New York: Springer 1971

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  3. Hookway, R.J., Ernst, G.W.: A program verification system. ACM '76: Proceedings of the annual conference, pp. 504–508. New York: Association for Computing Machinery 1976

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  4. Igarashi, S., London, R.L., Luckham, D.C.: Automatic program verification. I. A logical basis and its implementation. Acta Informatica 4, 145–182 (1975)

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  5. Jensen, K., With, N.: PASCAL user manual and report, 2nd ed. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 18. Berlin-Heidelberg-New York: Springer 1975

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering and Information Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, 44106, Cleveland, OH, USA

    George W. Ernst

Authors
  1. George W. Ernst
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Additional information

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. MCS 75-23412

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Ernst, G.W. Rules of inference for procedure calls. Acta Informatica 8, 145–152 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00289246

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00289246

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