The Concept of Class Invariant in Object-oriented Programming

Author:

Meyer Bertrand1ORCID,Arkadova Alisa2ORCID,Kogtenkov Alexander3ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Constructor Institute, Schaffhausen, Switzerland and Eiffel Software, Santa Barbara, USA

2. Previously at University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France

3. Previously at Constructor Institute, Schaffhausen, Switzerland and Previously at Eiffel Software, Santa Barbara, USA

Abstract

Class invariants—consistency constraints preserved by every operation on objects of a given type—are fundamental to building, understanding, and verifying object-oriented programs. For verification, however, they raise difficulties, which have not yet received a generally accepted solution. The present work introduces a proof rule meant to address these issues and allow verification tools to benefit from invariants. It clarifies the notion of invariant and identifies the three associated problems: callbacks, furtive access, and reference leak. As an example, the 2016 Ethereum DAO bug, in which $50 million was stolen, resulted from a callback invalidating an invariant. The discussion starts with a simplified model of computation and an associated proof rule, demonstrating its soundness. It then removes one by one the three simplifying assumptions, each removal raising one of the three issues and leading to a corresponding adaptation to the proof rule. The final version of the rule can tackle tricky examples, including “challenge problems” listed in the literature.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Reference59 articles.

1. M. Anthony Aiello, Johannes Kanig, and Taro Kurita. 2020. Call me back, I have a type invariant. In Formal Methods. FM 2019 International Workshops. Springer, 325–336.

2. Taming callbacks for smart contract modularity

3. Alisa Arkadova Alexander Kogtenkov Alexandr Naumchev and Bertrand Meyer. 2021-2022. Source Code and Other Supporting Material for This Article. Retrieved from https://github.com/alicealice19/invariant_paper

4. Modular reasoning about invariants over shared state with interposed data members

5. Stephanie Balzer and Thomas R. Gross. 2011. Verifying multi-object invariants with relationships. In ECOOP ’11, Mira Mezini (Ed.), Vol. 6813. Springer, 358–382.

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