Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 September 2017
Fifty years ago, John McCarthy and James Painter (1967) published the first paper on compiler verification, in which they showed how to formally prove the correctness of a compiler that translates arithmetic expressions into code for a register-based machine. In this article, we revisit this example in a modern context, and show how such a compiler can now be calculated directly from a specification of its correctness using simple equational reasoning techniques.
Graham Hutton was funded by EPSRC grant EP/P00587X/1, Unified Reasoning About Program Correctness and Efficiency.
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