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A structural proof of the soundness of rely/guarantee rules

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 article 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: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Journal of Logic and Computation

Year: 2007

Volume: 17

Issue: 4

Pages: 807-841

Print publication date: 01/08/2007

Date deposited: 14/01/2011

ISSN (print): 0955-792X

ISSN (electronic): 1465-363X

Publisher: Oxford University Press

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/logcom/exm030

DOI: 10.1093/logcom/exm030

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