From definitional interpreter to symbolic executor

Adrian D. Mensing, Hendrik Van Antwerpen, Casper Bach Poulsen, Eelco Visser

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)
252 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Symbolic execution is a technique for automatic software validation and verification. New symbolic executors regularly appear for both existing and new languages and such symbolic executors are generally manually (re)implemented each time we want to support a new language. We propose to automatically generate symbolic executors from language definitions, and present a technique for mechanically (but as yet, manually) deriving a symbolic executor from a definitional interpreter. The idea is that language designers define their language as a monadic definitional interpreter, where the monad of the interpreter defines the meaning of branch points. Developing a symbolic executor for a language is a matter of changing the monadic interpretation of branch points. In this paper, we illustrate the technique on a language with recursive functions and pattern matching, and use the derived symbolic executor to automatically generate test cases for definitional interpreters implemented in our defined language.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMETA 2019 - Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Meta-Programming Techniques and Reflection, co-located with SPLASH 2019
EditorsChristophe Scholliers, Guido Chari
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages11-20
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450369855
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 20 Oct 2019
Event4th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Meta-Programming Techniques and Reflection, META 2019, co-located with SPLASH 2019 - Athens, Greece
Duration: 20 Oct 2019 → …

Conference

Conference4th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Meta-Programming Techniques and Reflection, META 2019, co-located with SPLASH 2019
Country/TerritoryGreece
CityAthens
Period20/10/19 → …

Keywords

  • Definitional Interpreter
  • Haskell
  • Monads
  • Symbolic Execution

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