2019-10-07
On the nature of symbolic execution
Publication
Publication
Presented at the
International Symposium on Formal Methods (October 2019), Porto, Portugal
In this paper, we provide a formal definition of symbolic execution in terms of a symbolic transition system and prove its correctness with respect to an operational semantics which models the execution on concrete values. We first introduce such a formal model for a basic programming language with a statically fixed number of programming variables. This model is extended to a programming language with recursive procedures which are called by a call-by-value parameter mechanism. Finally, we show how to extend this latter model of symbolic execution to arrays and object-oriented languages which feature dynamically allocated variables.
| Additional Metadata | |
|---|---|
| doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30942-8_6 | |
| Lecture Notes in Computer Science | |
| International Symposium on Formal Methods | |
| Organisation | Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam (CWI), The Netherlands |
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de Boer, F., & Bonsangue, M. (2019). On the nature of symbolic execution. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Formal Methods (pp. 64–80). doi:10.1007/978-3-030-30942-8_6 |
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