Automated verification of shape, size and bag properties

Abstract

In recent years, separation logic has emerged as a contender for formal reasoning of heap-manipulating imperative programs. Recent works have focused on specialised provers that are mostly based on fixed sets of predicates. To improve expressivity, we have proposed a prover that can automatically handle user-defined predicates. These shape predicates allow programmers to describe a wide range of data structures with their associated size properties. In the current work, we shall enhance this prover by providing support for a new type of constraints, namely bag (multiset) constraints. With this extension, we can capture the reachable nodes (or values) inside a heap predicate as a bag constraint. Consequently, we are able to prove properties about the actual values stored inside a data structure. © 2007 IEEE.