[TUHS] A fuzzy awk

[Tom Perrine]

Another Gypsy user here...

For KSOS-11 the kernel was described in SPECIAL - as a set of axioms and
theorems. There was no actual connection between the formal specification
in SPECIAL and the Modula code.

Some of the critical user-space code for a trusted downgrade program, to
bridge data from higher levels of classification to lower, was written in
Gypsy. I visited UT Austin and Dr Good(?)'s team to learn it, IIRC. Gypsy
was considered better in that the specification was tied to the executable
through the pre/post conditions - and the better support for semi-automated
theorem proving.




On Sat, May 25, 2024 at 10:18 AM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 8:18 PM Bakul Shah via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> At one point I had suggested turning Go's Interface type to something like
>> Guttag style abstract data types in that relevant axioms are specified
>> right in the interface definition. The idea was that any concrete type that
>> implements that interface must satisfy its axioms. Even if the compiler
>> ignored these axioms, one can write a support program that can generate a
>> set of comprehensive tests based on these axioms. [Right now a type
>> "implementing" an interface only needs to have a set of methods that
>> exactly match the interface methods but nothing more] The underlying idea
>> is that each type is in essence a constraint on what values an instance of
>> that type can take. So adding such axioms simply tightens (& documents)
>> these constraints. Just the process of coming up with such axioms can
>> improve the design (sor of like test driven design but better!).
>>
>
> At one point I worked with a programming language called Gypsy that
> implemented this concept.  Each routine had a prefix that specified axioms
> on the routine's parameters and outputs.  The rest of Gypsy was a
> conventional procedural language but the semantics were carefully chosen to
> allow for automated proof of correctness.  I wrote a formal specification
> for the DECnet session layer protocol (DECnet's equivalent of TCP) in
> Gypsy.  I turned up a subtle bug in the prose version of the protocol
> specification in the process.
>
> -Paul W.
>
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