Translucid contracts: expressive specification and modular verification for aspect-oriented interfaces

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2011-01-01
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Rajan, Hridesh
Bagherzadeh, Megdi
Leavens, Gary
Moody, Sean
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Rajan, Hridesh
Professor and Department Chair of Computer Science
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Computer Science

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.

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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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As aspect-oriented (AO) programming techniques become more widely used, their use in critical systems such as aircraft and telephone networks, will become more widespread. However, careful reasoning about AO code seems difficult because: (1) advice may apply in too many places, and (2) standard specification techniques do not limit the control effects of advice. Commonly used black box specification techniques cannot easily specify control effects, such as advice that does not proceed to the advised code. In this work we avoid the first problem by using Ptolemy, a language with explicit event announcement. To solve the second problem we give a simple and understandable specification technique, translucid contracts, that not only allows programmers to write modular specifications for advice and advised code, but also allows them to reason about the code's control effects. We show that translucid contracts support sound modular verification of typical interaction patterns used in AO code. We also show that translucid contracts allow interesting control effects to be specified and enforced.

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This is a manuscript of a proceeding published as Bagherzadeh, Mehdi, Hridesh Rajan, Gary T. Leavens, and Sean Mooney. "Translucid contracts: Expressive specification and modular verification for aspect-oriented interfaces." In Proceedings of the tenth international conference on Aspect-oriented software development, pp. 141-152. ACM, 2011. 10.1145/1960275.1960293. Posted with permission.

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Sat Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 2011