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Social processes, program verification and all that

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

ANDREA ASPERTI ,
HERMAN GEUVERS  and
RAJA NATARAJAN
ANDREA ASPERTI
Affiliation:
Dept. of Comp. Sci., Univ. of Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, 40127 Bologna, Italy Email: asperti@cs.unibo.it
HERMAN GEUVERS
Affiliation:
Dept. of Comp. Sci., Radboud Univ. Nijmegen and Tech. Univ. Eindhoven, The Netherlands Email: herman@cs.ru.nl
RAJA NATARAJAN
Affiliation:
School of Tech. and Comp. Sci., Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai 400 005, India Email: raja@tifr.res.in
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Abstract

In a controversial paper (De Millo et al. 1979) at the end of the 1970's, R. A. De Millo, R. J. Lipton and A. J. Perlis argued against formal verifications of programs, mostly motivating their position by an analogy with proofs in mathematics, and, in particular, with the impracticality of a strictly formalist approach to this discipline. The recent, impressive achievements in the field of interactive theorem proving provide an interesting ground for a critical revisiting of their theses. We believe that the social nature of proof and program development is uncontroversial and ineluctable, but formal verification is not antithetical to it. Formal verification should strive not only to cope with, but to ease and enhance the collaborative, organic nature of this process, eventually helping us to master the growing complexity of scientific knowledge.

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Paper
Information
Mathematical Structures in Computer Science , Volume 19 , Issue 5 , October 2009 , pp. 877 - 896
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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