Subtyping, Modular Specification, and Modular Verification for Applicative Object-Oriented Programs
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Computer Science—the theory, representation, processing, communication and use of information—is fundamentally transforming every aspect of human endeavor. The Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University advances computational and information sciences through; 1. educational and research programs within and beyond the university; 2. active engagement to help define national and international research, and 3. educational agendas, and sustained commitment to graduating leaders for academia, industry and government.
History
The Computer Science Department was officially established in 1969, with Robert Stewart serving as the founding Department Chair. Faculty were composed of joint appointments with Mathematics, Statistics, and Electrical Engineering. In 1969, the building which now houses the Computer Science department, then simply called the Computer Science building, was completed. Later it was named Atanasoff Hall. Throughout the 1980s to present, the department expanded and developed its teaching and research agendas to cover many areas of computing.
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1969-present
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- College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (parent college)
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Abstract
We present a formal specification language and a formal verification logic for a simple object-oriented programming language. The language is applicative and statically typed, and supports subtyping and message-passing. The verification logic relies on a behavioral notion of subtyping that captures the intuition that a subtype behaves like its supertypes. We give a formal definition for legal subtype relations, based on the specified behavior of objects, and show that this definition is sufficient to ensure the soundness of the verification logic. The verification logic reflects the way programmers reason informally about object-oriented programs, in that it allows them to use static type information, which avoids the need to consider all possible run-time subtypes. We also show that the logic does not require reverification of unchanged code when legal subtypes are added to a program.
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© Gary T. Leavens and William E. Weihl, 1992, 1993, 1994. All rights reserved. Much of this report will appear in Acta Informatica, and so the copyright for those portions will be assumed by the Springer-Verlag.