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Lookup NU author(s): Emeritus Professor Cliff JonesORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Hoare-style inference rules for program constructs permit the copying of expressions and tests from program text into logical contexts. It is known that this requires care even for sequential programs but much more serious issues arise with concurrent programs because of potential interference to the values of variables. The “rely-guarantee” approach tackles the challenge of recording acceptable interference and offers a way to provide safe inference rules for concurrent constructs. This paper shows how the algebraic presentation of rely-guarantee ideas can clarify and formalise the conditions for safely re-using expressions and tests from program text in logical contexts for reasoning about concurrent programs; crucially this extends to handling expressions that reference more than one shared variable. A non-trivial example related to the Fischer-Galler forest representation of equivalence relations is treated.
Author(s): Hayes IJ, Jones CB, Meinicke LA
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Formal Aspects of Computing
Year: 2026
Pages: epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 19/03/2026
Acceptance date: 04/03/2026
Date deposited: 23/03/2026
ISSN (print): 0934-5043
ISSN (electronic): 1433-299X
Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3801150
DOI: 10.1145/3801150
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