A Programmer-Centric Approach to Program Verification in ATS

TL;DR

This paper introduces a programmer-centric verification approach in ATS, emphasizing literate explanations to bridge the gap between formal specifications and implementation, thereby enhancing software correctness.

Contribution

It proposes a novel, example-driven verification style in ATS that encourages programmers to articulate their reasoning, improving the alignment of code with formal specifications.

Findings

Enhanced verification through literate explanations

Improved alignment between code and specifications

Practical demonstration with examples

Abstract

Formal specification is widely employed in the construction of high-quality software. However, there is often a huge gap between formal specification and actual implementation. While there is already a vast body of work on software testing and verification, the task to ensure that an implementation indeed meets its specification is still undeniably of great difficulty. ATS is a programming language equipped with a highly expressive type system that allows the programmer to specify and implement and then verify within the language itself that an implementation meets its specification. In this paper, we present largely through examples a programmer-centric style of program verification that puts emphasis on requesting the programmer to explain in a literate fashion why his or her code works. This is a solid step in the pursuit of software construction that is verifiably correct according to specification.