Tobias Runge ; Tabea Bordis ; Alex Potanin ; Thomas Thüm ; Ina Schaefer - Flexible Correct-by-Construction Programming

lmcs:10384 - Logical Methods in Computer Science, June 7, 2023, Volume 19, Issue 2 - https://doi.org/10.46298/lmcs-19(2:16)2023
Flexible Correct-by-Construction ProgrammingArticle

Authors: Tobias Runge ; Tabea Bordis ; Alex Potanin ; Thomas Thüm ; Ina Schaefer

    Correctness-by-Construction (CbC) is an incremental program construction process to construct functionally correct programs. The programs are constructed stepwise along with a specification that is inherently guaranteed to be satisfied. CbC is complex to use without specialized tool support, since it needs a set of predefined refinement rules of fixed granularity which are additional rules on top of the programming language. Each refinement rule introduces a specific programming statement and developers cannot depart from these rules to construct programs. CbC allows to develop software in a structured and incremental way to ensure correctness, but the limited flexibility is a disadvantage of CbC. In this work, we compare classic CbC with CbC-Block and TraitCbC. Both approaches CbC-Block and TraitCbC, are related to CbC, but they have new language constructs that enable a more flexible software construction approach. We provide for both approaches a programming guideline, which similar to CbC, leads to well-structured programs. CbC-Block extends CbC by adding a refinement rule to insert any block of statements. Therefore, we introduce CbC-Block as an extension of CbC. TraitCbC implements correctness-by-construction on the basis of traits with specified methods. We formally introduce TraitCbC and prove soundness of the construction strategy. All three development approaches are qualitatively compared regarding their programming constructs, tool support, and usability to assess which is best suited for certain tasks and developers.


    Volume: Volume 19, Issue 2
    Published on: June 7, 2023
    Accepted on: April 20, 2023
    Submitted on: November 29, 2022
    Keywords: Computer Science - Logic in Computer Science,Computer Science - Programming Languages,Computer Science - Software Engineering

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