Rule-based analysis of dimensional safety

Feng Chen, Grigore Roşu, Ram Prasad Venkatesan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Dimensional safety policy checking is an old topic in software analysis concerned with ensuring that programs do not violate basic principles of units of measurement. Scientific and/or navigation software is routinely dimensional and violations of measurement unit safety policies can hide significant domain-specific errors which are hard or impossible to find otherwise. Dimensional analysis of programs written in conventional programming languages is addressed in this paper. We draw general design principles for dimensional analysis tools and then discuss our prototypes, implemented by rewriting, which include both dynamic and static checkers. Our approach is based on assume/assert annotations of code which are properly interpreted by our tools and ignored by standard compilers/interpreters. The output of our prototypes consists of warnings that list those expressions violating the unit safety policy. These prototypes are implemented in the rewriting system Maude.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
EditorsRobert Nieuwenhuis
PublisherSpringer
Pages197-207
Number of pages11
ISBN (Print)3540402543, 9783540402541
DOIs
StatePublished - 2003
Event14th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications, RTA 2003 - Valencia, Spain
Duration: Jun 9 2003Jun 11 2003

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume2706
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other14th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications, RTA 2003
Country/TerritorySpain
CityValencia
Period6/9/036/11/03

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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