2018/09/07 by Michele Chiari, Dino Mandrioli, Matteo Pradella
Computer Science · #Computation tree logic #Computer science #Finite-state machine #Formal Methods in Verification #Interval temporal logic #Linear temporal logic #Logic, programming, and type systems #Model checking #Model-Driven Software Engineering Techniques #Parsing #Programming language #Pushdown automaton #Temporal logic #Temporal logic of actions #Theoretical computer science #cs.LO
paper · pdf · doi:10.4204/eptcs.277.12
published as EPTCS 277, 2018, pp. 161-175 · In Proceedings GandALF 2018, arXiv:1809.02416
openalex publication_date 2018/09/07 · arxiv created 2018/09/10 · arxiv updated 2018/09/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In the last decades much research effort has been devoted to extending the success of model checking from the traditional field of finite state machines and various versions of temporal logics to suitable subclasses of context-free languages and appropriate extensions of temporal logics. To the best of our knowledge such attempts only covered structured languages, i.e. languages whose structure is immediately "visible" in their sentences, such as tree-languages or visibly pushdown ones. In this paper we present a new temporal logic suitable to express and automatically verify properties of operator precedence languages. This "historical" language family has been recently proved to enjoy fundamental algebraic and logic properties that make it suitable for model checking applications yet breaking the barrier of visible-structure languages (in fact the original motivation of its inventor Floyd was just to support efficient parsing, i.e. building the "hidden syntax tree" of language sentences). We prove that our logic is at least as expressive as analogous logics defined for visible pushdown languages yet covering a much more powerful family; we design a procedure that, given a formula in our logic builds an automaton recognizing the sentences satisfying the formula, whose size is at most exponential in the length of the formula.