Semantics
Descriptive and Relative Completeness of Logics for Higher-Order Functions
Kohei Honda1, Martin Berger1 and Nobuko Yoshida2
| (1) |
Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary, University of London, |
| (2) |
Department of Computing, Imperial College London, |
Abstract
This paper establishes a strong completeness property of compositional program logics for pure and imperative higher-order
functions introduced in [18, 16, 17, 19, 3]. This property, called descriptive completeness, says that for each program there is an assertion fully describing the program’s behaviour up to the standard observational
semantics. This formula is inductively calculable from the program text alone. As a consequence we obtain the first relative
completeness result for compositional logics of pure and imperative call-by-value higher-order functions in the full type
hierarchy.
Work is partially supported by EPSRC GR/R03075/01, GR/T04236/01, GR/S55538/01, GR/T04724/01, GR/T03208/01 and IST-2005-015905
MOBIUS.