Home → Magazine Archive → April 1977 (Vol. 20, No. 4) → Proof techniques for hierarchically structured programs → Abstract

Proof techniques for hierarchically structured programs

By Lawrence Robinson, Karl N. Levitt

Communications of the ACM, Vol. 20 No. 4, Pages 271-283
10.1145/359461.359483



A method for describing and structuring programs that simplifies proofs of their correctness is presented. The method formally represents a program in terms of levels of abstraction, each level of which can be described by a self-contained nonprocedural specification. The proofs, like the programs, are structured by levels. Although only manual proofs are described in the paper, the method is also applicable to semi-automatic and automatic proofs. Preliminary results are encouraging, indicating that the method can be applied to large programs, such as operating systems.

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