Light-weight theorem proving for debugging and verifying units of code

Abstract

Software bugs are very difficult to detect even in small units of code. Several techniques to debug or prove correct such units are based on the generation of a set of formulae whose unsatisfiability reveals the presence of an error. These techniques assume the availability of a theorem prover capable of automatically discharging the resulting proof obligations. Building such a tool is a difficult, long, and error-prone activity. In this paper, we describe techniques to build provers which are highly automatic and flexible by combining state-of-the-art superposition theorem provers and BDDs. We report experimental results on formulae extracted from the debugging of C functions manipulating pointers showing that an implementation of our techniques can discharge proof obligations which cannot be handled by Simplify (the theorem prover used in the ESC/Java tool) and perform much better on others.