Formal semantics of programming languages supports not only reasoning over individual programs (program correctness), but also reasoning over program transformations and static analyses, as typically found in compilers (tool correctness). With the help of a proof assistant, we can prove semantic preservation properties of program transformations and semantic soundness properties of static analyses that greatly increase the confidence we can have in compilers and program verification tools.
The course illustrates these ideas on a simple compiler for IMP (a simple imperative language), formalized and proved correct using the Coq proof assistant.
The slides for the lectures.
A ZIP archive containing all the Coq sources. Do make -f CoqMakefile to compile.
The Coq sources, pretty-printed and HTML-formatted:
Xavier.Leroy@college-de-france.fr