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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Joey Coleman, Emeritus Professor Cliff JonesORCiD
The challenge of finding compositional ways of (formally) developing concurrent programs is considerable. Various forms of rely and guarantee conditions have been used to record and reason about interference in ways which do indeed provide compositional development methods for such programs. This paper presents a new approach to justifying the soundness of rely/guarantee inference rules. The underlying concurrent language is defined by an operational semantics which allows fine-grained interleaving and nested concurrency; the proof that the rely/guarantee rules are consistent with that semantics (including termination) is by a structural induction. A lemma which relates the states which can arise from the extra interference that results from taking a portion of the program out of context is key to our ability to do the proof without having to perform induction over the computation history. This lemma also offers a way to understand some elusive expressibility issues around rely/guarantee conditions.
Author(s): Coleman JW, Jones CB
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: School of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 2006
Pages: 28
Print publication date: 01/10/2006
Source Publication Date: October 2006
Report Number: 987
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/987.pdf
