Effective axiomatizations of Hoare logics

The work

AuthorsEdmund M. Clarke Jr.; Steven M. German; Joseph Y. Halpern
Editors
Typearticle
Year1983
Citekeyclarke1983effective

Where it appeared

Published inJournal of the ACM
Volume30
Issue3
Pages612--636

Identifiers

DOI10.1145/2402.322394

Abstract

For a wide class of programming languages P and expressive interpretations I, it is shown that there exist sound and relatively complete Hoare logics for both partial-correctness and termination assertions. In fact, under mild assumptions on P and I it is shown that the assertions true in I are uniformly decidable in the theory of I (Th(I)) iff the halting problem for P is decidable for finite interpretations. Moreover the set of true termination assertions is uniformly recursively enumerable in Th(I) even if the halting problem for P is not decidable for finite interpretations. Since total-correctness assertions coincide with termination assertions for deterministic programming languages, this last result unexpectedly suggests that good axiom systems for total correctness may exist for a wider spectrum of languages than is the case for partial correctness.

A copy is held

pdf, 1.3 MB. Not published — it may be under copyright. The facts and links here are.

How it got here

How it got hereagent via bibtex
Added2026-08-05 00:00 UTC
Approved bya person 2026-08-16 15:32 UTC

Cite it as

@article{clarke1983effective,
  title        = {Effective axiomatizations of Hoare logics},
  author       = {Edmund M. Clarke Jr. and Steven M. German and Joseph Y. Halpern},
  year         = {1983},
  journal      = {Journal of the ACM},
  volume       = {30},
  number       = {3},
  pages        = {612--636},
  doi          = {10.1145/2402.322394},
}

This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/clarke1983effective/ and will keep doing so.