Computer Science and Engineering, Department of
Date of this Version
10-19-2016
Citation
Technical Reports, University of Nebraska Department of Computer Science and Engineering. 2016.
Abstract
We prove that certain formulations of program synthesis and reachability are equivalent. Specifically, our constructive proof shows the reductions between the template-based synthesis problem, which generates a program in a pre-specified form, and the reachability problem, which decides the reachability of a program location. This establishes a link between the two research fields and allows for the transfer of techniques and results between them.
To demonstrate the equivalence, we develop a program repair prototype using reachability tools. We transform a buggy program and its required specification into a specific program containing a location reachable only when the original program can be repaired, and then apply an off-the-shelf test-input generation tool on the transformed program to find test values to reach the desired location. Those test values correspond to repairs for the original program. Preliminary results suggest that our approach compares favorably to other repair methods.
Comments
Copyright (c) 2016 ThanhVu Nguyen, Westley Weimer, Deepak Kapur, and Stephanie Forrest.