Intrinsically-typed definitional interpreters à la carte

Specifying and mechanically verifying type safe programming languages requires significant effort. This effort can in theory be reduced by defining and reusing pre-verified, modular components. In practice, however, existing approaches to modular mechanical verification require many times as much sp...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of ACM on programming languages Vol. 6; no. OOPSLA2; pp. 1903 - 1932
Main Authors: van der Rest, Cas, Poulsen, Casper Bach, Rouvoet, Arjen, Visser, Eelco, Mosses, Peter
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 31.10.2022
Subjects:
Formal language definitions
Program verification
Software and its engineering
Software notations and tools
Theory of computation
Type Safety
Dependently Typed Programming
Definitional Interpreters
Modularity
Reuse
ISSN:2475-1421, 2475-1421
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Specifying and mechanically verifying type safe programming languages requires significant effort. This effort can in theory be reduced by defining and reusing pre-verified, modular components. In practice, however, existing approaches to modular mechanical verification require many times as much specification code as plain, monolithic definitions. This makes it hard to develop new reusable components, and makes existing component specifications hard to grasp. We present an alternative approach based on intrinsically-typed interpreters, which reduces the size and complexity of modular specifications as compared to existing approaches. Furthermore, we introduce a new abstraction for safe-by-construction specification and composition of pre-verified type safe language components: language fragments. Language fragments are about as concise and easy to develop as plain, monolithic intrinsically-typed interpreters, but require about 10 times less code than previous approaches to modular mechanical verification of type safety.
ISSN:2475-1421
2475-1421
DOI:10.1145/3563355