Abstract: “Two programs are fully equivalent if, for the same input, either they both diverge or they both terminate with the same result. Full equivalence is an adequate notion of equivalence for programs written in deterministic languages. It is useful in many contexts, such as capturing the correctness of program transformations within the same language, or capturing the correctness of compilers between two different languages.
In this paper we introduce a language-independent proof system for full equivalence, which is parametric in the operational semantics of two languages and in a state-similarity relation. The proof system is sound: a proof tree establishes the full equivalence of the programs given to it as input. We illustrate it on two programs in two different languages (an imperative one and a functional one), that both compute the Collatz sequence. The Collatz sequence is an interesting case study since it is not known weather the sequence terminates or not; nevertheless, our proof system shows that the two programs are fully equivalent (even if we cannot establish termination or divergence of either one).”
Looks like they didn’t run bibtex enough times. Here’s a version with citations fixed:
https://profs.info.uaic.ro/~stefan.ciobaca/faoc2016.pdf
Can anyone comment on the generality and efficiency of their method? I’ve only skimmed it very quickly but didn’t find discussion about that.
I can’t tell you that as a non-specialist. What I can tell you is it’s based on matching logic that Rosu et al use in the K Framework. They used that to make a C compiler, lots of language specs, and a static analysis tool with low, false positives. They’re interesting to me since they operate in their own bubble of rewriting logic instead of Coq, Isabelle/HOL, etc. They built on Maude.
Interesting. I pretty much don’t know anything here. Thanks for the links.