Automated result verification with AWK

Abstract

The goal of result-verification is to prove that one execution run of a program satisfies its specification. Compared with implementation-verification, result-verification has a larger scope for applications in practice, gives more opportunities for automation and, based on the execution record not the implementation, is particularly suitable for complex systems. This paper proposes a technical framework to apply this technique in practice. We show how to write formal result-based specifications, how to generate a verifier program to check a given specification and to carry out result-verification according to the generated program. The execution result is written as a text file, the verifier is written in AWK (special-purpose language for text processing) and verification is done automatically by the AWK interpreter given the verifier and the execution result as inputs.