Towards the Formal Specification and Verification of Maple Programs
This work addresses the challenge of verifying programs in computer algebra languages like Maple, which is more complex due to non-standard types and abstract concepts, but it is incremental as it focuses on a subset and reports ongoing efforts.
The paper tackles the problem of finding behavioral errors in MiniMaple programs through formal specification and verification, presenting initial results including the definition and formalization of syntax, semantics, a type system, and a specification language for this subset of Maple.
In this paper, we present our ongoing work and initial results on the formal specification and verification of MiniMaple (a substantial subset of Maple with slight extensions) programs. The main goal of our work is to find behavioral errors in such programs w.r.t. their specifications by static analysis. This task is more complex for widely used computer algebra languages like Maple as these are fundamentally different from classical languages: they support non-standard types of objects such as symbols, unevaluated expressions and polynomials and require abstract computer algebraic concepts and objects such as rings and orderings etc. As a starting point we have defined and formalized a syntax, semantics, type system and specification language for MiniMaple.