{"id":151328,"date":"1999-01-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1999-01-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/a-trace-model-for-pointers-and-objects\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T20:30:21","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T03:30:21","slug":"a-trace-model-for-pointers-and-objects","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/a-trace-model-for-pointers-and-objects\/","title":{"rendered":"A Trace model for pointers and objects"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>Object-oriented programs are notoriously prone to the following kinds of error, which could lead to increasingly severe problems in the presence of tasking: (1) following a null pointer; (2) deletion of an accessible object; (3) failure to delete an inaccessible object; (4) interference due to equality of pointers; (5) inhibition of optimisation due to fear of (4). Type disciplines and object classes are a great help in avoiding these errors. Stronger protection may be obtainable with the help of assertions, particularly invariants, which are intended to be true before and after each call of a method that updates the structure of the heap. This paper introduces a mathematical model and language for the formulation of assertions about objects and pointers, and suggests that a graphical calculus (Curtis & Lowe, 1995) may help in reasoning about program correctness. It deals with both garbage-collected heaps and the other kind. The theory is based on a trace model of graphs, using ideas from process algebra; and our development seeks to exploit this analogy as a unifying principle.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Object-oriented programs are notoriously prone to the following kinds of error, which could lead to increasingly severe problems in the presence of tasking: (1) following a null pointer; (2) deletion of an accessible object; (3) failure to delete an inaccessible object; (4) interference due to equality of pointers; (5) inhibition of optimisation due to fear 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