Separation logic: a logic for shared mutable data structures

John C. Reynolds
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Read: 04 February 2020

Proceedings 17th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science
Volume
Pages 55-74
July 2002
Topic(s): verification
Note(s): separation logic, permission logic

Separation logic is an extension of Hoare logic for reasoning about programs that use pointers. In particular, it copes well with aliasing (by providing a compact way of saying that a set of pointers do not alias) and a “frame rule” that lets you reason locally about a piece of code without getting bogged down in the surrounding context. This paper introduces separation logic, illustrates its use to verify a number of list, tree and dag algorithms [this is one of the real strengths of this paper] and discusses a lot of the work by the author and others on developing, defining, using and extending the different forms of separation logic that existed at the time (2002).