Understanding Computation

Abstract

Interpretation Abstract interpretation gives us a way of approaching a problem that’s somehow too difficult to handle, perhaps because it’s too large, too complex, or has too many unknowns to be tackled directly. The main idea of abstract interpretation is to use an abstraction, a model of the real problem that discards enough detail to make it manageable—perhaps by making it smaller, simpler, or by eliminating unknowns—but that also retains enough detail to make its solution relevant to the original problem.interpretation gives us a way of approaching a problem that’s somehow too difficult to handle, perhaps because it’s too large, too complex, or has too many unknowns to be tackled directly. The main idea of abstract interpretation is to use an abstraction, a model of the real problem that discards enough detail to make it manageable—perhaps by making it smaller, simpler, or by eliminating unknowns—but that also retains enough detail to make its solution relevant to the original problem. To make this vague idea more concrete, let’s look at a simple application of abstract interpretation.