Soundness and Completeness of an Axiom System for Program Verification

Stephen A Cook · SIAM Journal on Computing · 1978

A simple ALGOL-like language is defined which includes conditional, while, and procedure call statements as well as blocks. A formal interpretive semantics and a Hoare style axiom system are given for the language. The axiom system is proved to be sound, and in a certain sense complete, relative to the interpretive semantics. The main new results are the completeness theorem, and a careful treatment of the procedure call rules for procedures with global variables in their declarations.

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