8 - Syntactic criteria

Summary

In this chapter, we develop syntactic criteria on commands, which imply disjunctivity properties for their weakest preconditions. We suppose that the disjunctivity properties of the simple commands are known and try to generalize these properties to procedures and composite commands. From this chapter onward, the theory of Chapter 4 is indispensable.

In Section 8.1 we introduce, for a given set R of predicate transformers, a set of commands called the syntactic reflection Sy.R of R. The main property is that wp.q ∈ R for all q ∈ Sy.R. In Section 8.2 we provide methods to prove that a command belongs to the syntactic reflection.

In Section 8.3 the theory is specialized to the case that R is characterized by a disjunctivity property. Section 8.4 contains the next specialization, namely to the classes of total commands, of disjunctive commands, and of finitely nondeterminate commands. For our purposes the first two classes merely serve as examples or test cases. Our real aim is the class of the finitely nondeterminate commands. It is this class, or rather its syntactic reflection, that plays a key role in Chapters 11 and 13.

Syntactic reflection of semantic properties

Throughout this section we let R be a sup-closed subset of MT. We are interested in syntactic criteria on commands c ∈ A^⊙ that imply wp.c ∈ R. Our solution consists of an algebraic definition of a subset Sy.R of A^⊙ with wp.q ∈ R for all q ∈ Sy.R.