252-0058-00L  Formal Methods and Functional Programming

SemesterSpring Semester 2011
LecturersD. Basin, P. Müller
Periodicityyearly recurring course
Language of instructionEnglish


AbstractIn this course, participants will learn about new ways of specifying, reasoning about, and developing programs and computer systems. The first half will focus on using functional programs to express and reason about computation. The second half presents methods for developing and verifying programs represented as discrete transition systems.
Learning objectiveIn this course, participants will learn about new ways of specifying,
reasoning about, and developing programs and computer systems. Our objective is to help students raise their level of abstraction in modeling and implementing systems.
ContentThe first part of the course will focus on designing and reasoning
about functional programs. Functional programs are mathematical
expressions that are evaluated and reasoned about much like ordinary
mathematical functions. As a result, these expressions are simple to
analyze and compose to implement large-scale programs. We will cover the mathematical foundations of functional programming, the lambda calculus, as well as higher-order programming, typing, and proofs of correctness.

The second part of the course will focus on deductive and algorithmic validation of programs modeled as transition systems. As an example of deductive verification, students will learn how to formalize the semantics of imperative programming languages and how to use a formal semantics to prove properties of languages and programs. As an example of algorithmic validation, the course will introduce model checking and apply it to programs and program designs.