Systems code is almost universally written in the C programming language or a variant. C has a very low level of type and memory abstraction and formal reasoning about C systems code requires a memory model that is able to capture the semantics of C pointers and types. At the same time, proof-based verification demands abstraction, in particular from the aliasing and frame problems. In this thesis, we study the mechanisation of a series of models, from semantic to separation logic, for achieving this abstraction when performing interactive theorem-prover based verification of C systems code in higher- order logic. We do not commit common oversimplifications, but correctly deal with C's model of programming language values and the heap, while developing the ability to reason abstractly and efficiently. We validate our work by demonstrating that the models are applicable to real, security- and safety-critical code by formally verifying the memory allocator of the L4 microkernel. All formalisations and proofs have been developed and machine-checked in the Isabelle/HOL theorem prover.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1995. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-187).

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Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries / Department: Computer Science.

The demand for computers is oriented toward faster computers and newer computers are being built with more than one CPU. These computers require sophisticated software to program them. One such approach to program the multiple CPU machines is through the use of object-oriented programming techniques. An example of such an approach is the use of C* on the Connection Machine. Though C* supports many of the object-oriented concepts, it does not support the concept of software reuse through inheritance. This thesis introduces a new language called C*±+ , an extension of C* language to support inheritance. We also discuss the issues invloved in the implementation of multiple inheritance in programming languages. This thesis describes the differences between C** and C* . It also discusses the various issues involved in the design and implementation of the translator from C** to C* . It also illustrates the advantages of programming in C*++ through an example. Since C*++ is designed to support software reuse which allows the users to create quality software in shorter time, it is anticipated that C*+ will have widespread use in programming the Connection Machine.

An important idea in knowledge representation is that of libraries of reusable knowledge components. The goal of this research is to apply this idea to action description languages. An action language may be used to specify the effects and preconditions of actions, and serves to describe “transition systems” -- directed graphs with the vertices representing the states of an action domain and the edges representing the transitions that are caused by performing actions (or by the passage of time). Many actions can be described as special cases of other actions. (For example, pushing, carrying, going can all be described as special cases of moving things around.) However, descriptions of action domains in existing action languages describe the effects of all actions from scratch, which leads to common aspects of different domains getting reinvented over and over. In this dissertation we first developed a method for defining actions in terms of other actions, in the action language C+, a language with a rich set of features for describing action domains. This provided a theoretical basis for developing a library of general-purpose action descriptions and influenced the design of the Modular Action Description (MAD) language [Lifschitz and Ren, 2006], the semantics of which is based on C+. We extended the original MAD language in several ways, both in the syntactic dimension and in the semantic dimension, and developed an implementation of this extended language. The extended semantics not only provides new features but also addresses some shortcomings of the original semantics, which were identified during the course of our research. The implemented system was used to develop a library of basic MAD modules, each describing a group of general commonsense facts related to actions. Several action domains from the knowledge representation literature were formalized using the library of basic action descriptions. The availability of the library led to the representations being much simpler than before and also enabled us to recognize structural similarities of seemingly quite different domains. / text

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Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1992. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-101). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1991. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 63).