Holistic Specifications for Robust Programs

Abstract: Functional specifications describe what program components do: the sufficient conditions to invoke a component's operations. They allow us to reason about the use of components in the closed world setting, where the component interacts with known client code, and where the client code must establish the appropriate pre-conditions before calling into the component. Sufficient conditions are not enough to reason about the use of components in the open world setting, where the component interacts with external code, possibly of unknown provenance, and where the component itself may evolve over time. In this open world setting, we must also consider the necessary} conditions, i.e, what are the conditions without which an effect will not happen. In this paper we propose the language Chainmail for writing holistic specifications that focus on necessary conditions (as well as sufficient conditions). We give a formal semantics for \Chainmail. The core of Chainmail has been mechanised in the Coq proof assistant.