[m-dev.] Re: for review: add parsing/storing of assertions

[Fergus Henderson]

On 13-Jul-1999, Peter Schachte <schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 09, 1999 at 08:33:58AM +0000, Lee Naish wrote:
> > Assertions are a very general concept and a very flexible syntax has
> > been chosen for them....  sometimes
> > specialised assertions/representations are worthwhile.
> > ... For the different uses of assertions its
> > typically easiest to look for syntactic matches rather that applying a
> > FOL theorem prover to the assertions to see if what you are looking for
> > is a consequence of the assertions.
> 
> I think this is a very important point.  For the optimization you're
> doing now, failing to prove the property you're interested in just
> means the code won't be as efficient as it could.  But if these
> assertions are used as part of verifing declared properties (eg,
> declaring mutual exclusion or exaustiveness), then failing to prove
> something true means that a valid program won't compile.

I agree that we should definitely use different kinds of declarations
for any assertions that affect whether or not a program will compile.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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