Reducing the Number of Annotations in a Veri cation-oriented Imperative Language

Automated software veri cation is a very active eld of research which has made enormous progress both in theoretical and practical aspects. Recently, an important amount of research e ort has been put into applying these techniques on top of mainstream programming languages. These languages typically provide powerful features such as re ection, aliasing and polymorphism which are handy for practitioners but, in contrast, make veri cation a real challenge. In this work we present Pest, a simple experimental, while-style, multiprocedural, imperative programming language which was conceived with veri ability as one of its main goals. This language forces developers to concurrently think about both the statements needed to implement an algorithm and the assertions required to prove its correctness. In order to aid programmers, we propose several techniques to reduce the number and complexity of annotations required to successfully verify their programs. In particular, we show that high-level iteration constructs may alleviate the need for providing complex loop annotations.