2009 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Visibly Pushdown Kleene Algebra and Its Use in Interprocedural Analysis of (Mutually) Recursive Programs
Authors : Claude Bolduc, Béchir Ktari
Published in: Relations and Kleene Algebra in Computer Science
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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Kleene algebra is a great formalism for doing intraprocedural analysis and verification of programs, but it seems difficult to deal with interprocedural analysis where the power of context-free languages is often needed to represent both the program and the property. In the model checking framework, Alur and Madhusudan defined visibly pushdown automata, which accept a subclass of context-free languages called visibly pushdown languages, to do some interprocedural analyses of programs while remaining decidable. We present visibly pushdown Kleene algebra, an extension of Kleene algebra that axiomatises exactly the equational theory of visibly pushdown languages. The algebra is simply Kleene algebra along with a family of implicit least fixed point operators. Some interprocedural analyses of (mutually) recursive programs are possible in this formalism and it can deal with some non-regular properties.