06103241

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06103241 Ro\c{s}u, Grigore \c{S}tef\u{a}nescu, Andrei From hoare logic to matching logic reachability. Giannakopoulou, Dimitra (ed.) et al., FM 2012: Formal methods. 18th international symposium, Paris, France, August 27--31, 2012. Proceedings. Berlin: Springer (ISBN 978-3-642-32758-2/pbk). Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7436, 387-402 (2012). 2012 Berlin: Springer EN

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-32759-9_32

Summary: Matching logic reachability has been recently proposed as an alternative program verification approach. Unlike Hoare logic, where one defines a language-specific proof system that needs to be proved sound for each language separately, matching logic reachability provides a language-independent and sound proof system that directly uses the trusted operational semantics of the language as axioms. Matching logic reachability thus has a clear practical advantage: it eliminates the need for an additional semantics of the same language in order to reason about programs, and implicitly eliminates the need for tedious soundness proofs. What is not clear, however, is whether matching logic reachability is as powerful as Hoare logic. This paper introduces a technique to mechanically translate Hoare logic proof derivations into equivalent matching logic reachability proof derivations. The presented technique has two consequences: first, it suggests that matching logic reachability has no theoretical limitation over Hoare logic; and second, it provides a new approach to prove Hoare logics sound.