Formal verification of programs with exceptions

Abstract

Linguistic mechanisms for exception handling facilitate the production of reliable software and play an important role in fault-tolerant computing. A description is given of the functional semantics of a Pascal-like language which supports exception handling. A program with exceptions is considered as having a standard semantics, as well as an exceptional semantics for each exception that may be signaled during its execution. Standard functional semantics methods provide rules to obtain the function representing the standard semantics. The authors provide rules to determine the functions representing the exceptional semantics. Computing these functions also provides the exceptional domains of the program, i.e. the sets of initial conditions that will result in exceptions being signaled.<>