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Computer Science, Programming Languages, cs.PL
Abstract:
Relational program verification is a variant of program verification where
one can reason about two programs and as a special case about two executions of
a single program on different inputs. Relational program verification can be
used for reasoning about a broad range of properties, including equivalence and
refinement, and specialized notions such as continuity, information flow
security or relative cost. In a higher-order setting, relational program
verification can be achieved using relational refinement type systems, a form
of refinement types where assertions have a relational interpretation.
Relational refinement type systems excel at relating structurally equivalent
terms but provide limited support for relating terms with very different
structures.
We present a logic, called Relational Higher Order Logic (RHOL), for proving
relational properties of a simply typed $\lambda$-calculus with inductive types
and recursive definitions. RHOL retains the type-directed flavour of relational
refinement type systems but achieves greater expressivity through rules which
simultaneously reason about the two terms as well as rules which only
contemplate one of the two terms. We show that RHOL has strong foundations, by
proving an equivalence with higher-order logic (HOL), and leverage this
equivalence to derive key meta-theoretical properties: subject reduction,
admissibility of a transitivity rule and set-theoretical soundness. Moreover,
we define sound embeddings for several existing relational type systems such as
relational refinement types and type systems for dependency analysis and
relative cost, and we verify examples that were out of reach of prior work.
