Presburger-Definable Parameterized Typestates (1712.08753v1)

Abstract: Typestates are good at capturing dynamic states of a program as compared to normal types that can capture static structural properties of data and program. Although useful, typestates are suitable only for specifying and verifying program properties defined using finite-state abstractions. Many useful dynamic properties of programs are not finite-state definable. To address these issues, we introduce parameterized typestates (p-typestates). p-typestates associate a logical property with each state of regular typestate, thereby allowing specification of properties beyond finite-state abstractions. We present a dependent type system to express and verify p-typestate properties and a typestate-oriented core programming language incorporating these dependent types. Automatic inductive type-checking of p-typestate properties usually requires a programmer to provide loop invariants as annotations. Here we propose a way to calculate loop invariants automatically, using loop acceleration techniques for Presburger definable transition systems. \keywords{Programming Languages, Typestates, Dependent Types, Non-Regular Program Properties, Verification, Loop Invariants}