Program Verification

In 1969, Tony Hoare published a classical Communications' article, "An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming." Hoare's article culminated a sequence of works by Turing, McCarthy, Wirth, Floyd, and Manna, whose essence is an association of a proposition with each point in the program control flow, where the proposition is asserted to hold whenever that point is reach. Hoare added two important elements to that approach. First, he described a formal logic, now called Hoare Logic, for reasoning about programs. Second, he offered a compelling vision for the program-verification project: "When the correctness of a program, its compiler, and the hardware of the computer have all been established with mathematical certainty, it will be possible to place great reliance on the results of the program, and predict their properties with a confidence limited only by the reliability of the electronics."