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> However, every time somebody starts going negative on formal verification by talking about decidability, I get itchy. Sure, we know, all interesting propertie
by ebingdom 4y ago
> However, every time somebody starts going negative on formal verification by talking about decidability, I get itchy. Sure, we know, all interesting properties of programs in all interesting languages are undecidable in general. Rice's theorem, blah, blah, blah. For any given property and any given language, I can show you a program in that language such that you cannot determine whether that program has that property.
Decidability has nothing to do with this kind of formal verification. The tool doesn't have to decide the correctness of a program. The tool merely needs to check the validity of a proof of the program's correctness, which is rather trivial. Coming up with the proof is the hard part, and that responsibility still falls mostly on humans.