Formal Methods and Functional Programming

Overview

Lecturers: Prof. Dr. David Basin and Prof. Dr. Peter Müller

Classes: Tuesday 10-12 HG E 5 and Thursday 10-12 HG E 5

Credits: 7 ECTS (4V + 2U)

Requirements: none

Language: English

Exercise Classes

• Tuesday 13-15
  1. (German)
  2. ETZ H 91 Malte Schwerhoff (German)
  3. NO D 11 Alex Summers (English)
  4. NO E 11 Milos Novacek (English)
• Wednesday 15-17
  5. NOE 11 Malte Schwerhoff (German)

Course Material

The lecture notes, exercises, slides, and other resources are available in our protected page secured area.

Homework is optional, but highly recommended. There will be a session examination.

Submission instructions

Haskell programs must be submitted electronically via external page codeboard.io. The relevant assignments mention the URL of the corresponding project on codeboard.io. Please follow the submission guidelines outlined in the first exercise sheet to ensure that we are able to identify your submission and provide feedback.

Other assignments can be submitted in two ways: you can either send them by e-mail to your tutor or submit them on paper in the appropriate cardboard box outside room CAB F53.1. Solutions must be received by 11:00am on the Monday after the exercise is published, in order to receive feedback.

Description

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 modelling and implementing systems.

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 analyse 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 modelled 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.