Type Refinements

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

SF Proposal 0204248 Type Refinements Frank Pfenning and Robert Harper An important aspect of software development and maintenance is to understand properties of a complete system, its individual components, and how they interact. There is a wide range of properties of interest, some concerned only with the input/output behavior of functions, others concerned with concurrency or real-time requirements of processes. Upon examining the techniques for formally specifying, understanding, and verifying program behavior available today, one notices that they are almost bi-polar. On the one extreme we find work on proving the correctness of programs, on the other we find type systems for programming languages. Both of these have clear shortcomings: program proving is very expensive, time-consuming, and often infeasible, while present type systems support only minimal consistency properties of programs. The proposed research is intended to help bridge this gap by designing and implementing more refined type systems that allow rich classes of program properties to be expressed, yet still be automatically verified. Through careful, logically motivated design the research combines the best ideas from abstract interpretation, automated program analysis, type theory, and verification.