Abstract interpretation

In computer science, abstract interpretation is a theory of sound approximation of the semantics of computer programs, based on monotonic functions over ordered sets, especially lattices. It can be viewed as a partial execution of a computer program which gains information about its semantics (e.g., control-flow, data-flow) without performing all the calculations.

Its main concrete application is formal static analysis, the automatic extraction of information about the possible executions of computer programs; such analyses have two main usages:

Abstract interpretation was formalized by the French computer scientists Patrick Cousot and Radhia Cousot in the late 1970s.

This section illustrates abstract interpretation by means of real-world, non-computing examples.

Consider the people in a conference room. Assume a unique identifier for each person in the room, like a social security number in the United States. To prove that someone is not present, all one needs to do is see if their social security number is not on the list. Since two different people cannot have the same number, it is possible to prove or disprove the presence of a participant simply by looking up his or her number.

However it is possible that only the names of attendees were registered. If the name of a person is not found in the list, we may safely conclude that that person was not present; but if it is, we cannot conclude definitely without further inquiries, due to the possibility of homonyms (for example, two people named John Smith). Note that this imprecise information will still be adequate for most purposes, because homonyms are rare in practice. However, in all rigor, we cannot say for sure that somebody was present in the room; all we can say is that he or she was possibly here. If the person we are looking up is a criminal, we will issue an alarm; but there is of course the possibility of issuing a false alarm. Similar phenomena will occur in the analysis of programs.

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