Incorrectness logic

The work

AuthorsPeter W. O'Hearn
Typeinproceedings
Year2020
Also known asohearn2019incorrectness
Citekeyohearn2020incorrectness

Where it appeared

Published inProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Volume4
IssuePOPL
Pages10:1--10:32

Identifiers

DOI10.1145/3371078
OpenAlexW3207402727

Abstract

Program correctness and incorrectness are two sides of the same coin. As a programmer, even if you would like to have correctness, you might find yourself spending most of your time reasoning about incorrectness. This includes informal reasoning that people do while looking at or thinking about their code, as well as that supported by automated testing and static analysis tools. This paper describes a simple logic for program incorrectness which is, in a sense, the other side of the coin to Hoare's logic of correctness.

A copy is held

pdf, 745.2 kB. 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 2026-08-21 05:49 UTC

Cite it as

@inproceedings{ohearn2020incorrectness,
  title        = {Incorrectness logic},
  author       = {Peter W. O'Hearn},
  year         = {2020},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume       = {4},
  number       = {POPL},
  pages        = {10:1--10:32},
  publisher    = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  doi          = {10.1145/3371078},
}

This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/ohearn2020incorrectness/ and will keep doing so. It used to be called ohearn2019incorrectness, and those addresses still resolve to this one.