PVS - design for a practical verification system

In this paper we present a new and practical approach to program verification based on the transformational program development method. We believe this system, which we call the Practical Verification System, is both user-friendly and mathematically powerful. A user of this system would present the system with an initial abstract specification, written in the user-interface language, and the system, under the guidance of the user, would generate a program guaranteed to satisfy the goals set forth in the initial specification. The advantages of the transformational method are its potential ability to act as a rich source of high-level, reusable theorems, to allow efficient verification of resulting programs, and to track the user's understanding of a program. Simplicity of design is also achieved through the use of a single, powerful internal language, and through reliance on a large information database.