Inferring non-failure conditions for declarative programs
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Unintended failures during a computation are painful but frequent during software development. Failures due to external reasons (e.g., missing files, no permissions, etc.) can be caught by exception handlers. Programming failures, such as calling a partially defined operation with unintended arguments, are often not caught due to the assumption that the software is correct. This paper presents an approach to verify such assumptions. For this purpose, non-failure conditions for operations are inferred and then checked in all uses of partially defined operations. In the positive case, the absence of such failures is ensured. In the negative case, the programmer could adapt the program to handle possibly failing situations and check the program again. Our method is fully automatic and can be applied to larger declarative programs. The results of an implementation for functional logic Curry programs are presented.
Source: Science of Computer Programming
Author: Michael Hanus
Institution: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,600
OpenAlex ID: W7106340604