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A structural proof of the soundness of rely/guarantee rules (revised)

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Joey Coleman, Emeritus Professor Cliff JonesORCiD

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Abstract

Various forms of rely/guarantee conditions have been used to record and reason about interference in ways that provide compositional development methods for concurrent programs. This paper illustrates such a set of rules and proves their soundness. The underlying concurrent language allows fine-grained interleaving and nested concurrency; it is defined by an operational semantics; the proof that the rely/guarantee rules are consistent with that semantics (including termination) is by a structural induction. A key lemma which relates the states which can arise from the extra interference that results from taking a portion of the program out of context makes it possible to do the proofs without having to perform induction over the computation history. This lemma also offers a way to think about expressibility issues around auxiliary variables in rely/guarantee conditions.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Coleman JW, Jones CB

Publication type: Report

Publication status: Published

Series Title: School of Computing Science Technical Report Series

Year: 2007

Pages: 31

Print publication date: 01/06/2007

Source Publication Date: June 2007

Report Number: 1029

Institution: School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne

URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/1029.pdf


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