Abstract interpretation based formal methods and future challenges, invited paper

Abstract. In order to contribute to the solution of the software reliability problem, tools have been designed to analyze statically the run-time behavior of programs. Because the correctness problem is undecidable, some form of approximation is needed. The purpose of abstract interpretation is to formalize this idea of approximation. We illustrate informally the application of abstraction to the semantics of programming languages as well as to static program analysis. The main point is that in order to reason or compute about a complex system, some information must be lost, that is the observation of executions must be either partial or at a high level of abstraction. A few challenges for static program analysis by abstract interpretation are finally briefly discussed. The electronic version of this paper includes a comparison with other formal methods: typing, model-checking and deductive methods. 1 Introductory Motivation