Deriving Abstract Interpreters from Skeletal Semantics

Abstract: This paper describes a methodology for defining an executable abstract interpreter from a formal description of the semantics of a programming language. Our approach is based on Skeletal Semantics and an abstract interpretation of its semantic meta-language. The correctness of the derived abstract interpretation can be established by compositionality provided that correctness properties of the core language-specific constructs are established. We illustrate the genericness of our method by defining a Value Analysis for a small imperative language based on its skeletal semantics.