252-0058-00L Formal Methods and Functional Programming
Semester | Spring Semester 2011 |
Lecturers | D. Basin, P. Müller |
Periodicity | yearly recurring course |
Language of instruction | English |
Abstract | In 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 objective | In 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. |
Content | The 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. |