Program logics for homogeneous meta-programming

Abstract

A meta-program is a program that generates or manipulates another program; in homogeneous meta-programming, a program may generate new parts of, or manipulate, itself. Meta-programming has been used extensively since macros were introduced to Lisp, yet we have little idea how formally to reason about meta-programs. This paper provides the first program logics for homogeneous meta-programming - using a variant of MiniMLe□ by Davies and Pfenning as underlying meta-programming language. We show the applicability of our approach by reasoning about example meta-programs from the literature. We also demonstrate that our logics are relatively complete in the sense of Cook, enable the inductive derivation of characteristic formulae, and exactly capture the observational properties induced by the operational semantics. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.