In this paper, we provide a formal definition of symbolic execution in terms of a symbolic transition system and prove its correctness with respect to an operational semantics which models the execution on concrete values. We first introduce such a formal model for a basic programming language with a statically fixed number of programming variables. This model is extended to a programming language with recursive procedures which are called by a call-by-value parameter mechanism. Finally, we show how to extend this latter model of symbolic execution to arrays and object-oriented languages which feature dynamically allocated variables.
CITATION STYLE
de Boer, F. S., & Bonsangue, M. (2019). On the nature of symbolic execution. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 11800 LNCS, pp. 64–80). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30942-8_6
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