Blog

Bear-joke security is dead
Pascal Cuoq on 24 January 2014

Likely, you have heard this one before: Two campers are surprised by an angry bear. One of them starts putting on eir running shoes. Surprised the other exclaims “What are you doing Alex? You can't outrun a bear!” To which Alex replies: “I don't have to outrun the bear. I...

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Post-conditions and names of arguments
Pascal Cuoq on 17 January 2014

In an ACSL post-condition, any reference to the name of one of the function's arguments is assumed to refer to the initial value of the argument. /* ensures arg == 1; */ void f(int arg) { arg = 1; } For instance, in function f above, Frama-C's value analysis plug-in...

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Improving the world for 2014, one programmer at a time
Pascal Cuoq on 20 December 2013

I move that all computing devices be equipped with a small explosive charge, set to explode when someone refers someone else to Goldberg's What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic without the referrer emself having read it. It would not have to be lethal. I could be content...

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C-Reduce and Frama-C
Pascal Cuoq on 3 November 2013

Automatic testcase reduction for compilers: the story so far A previous post linked to a discussion of manual testcase reduction when the program being debugged is a compiler (and the input demonstrating the faulty behavior is thus a C program). Since then quite a few related events took place: In...

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Jakob Engblom on the Toyota Acceleration Case
Pascal Cuoq on 26 October 2013

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to link to this post by Jakob Engblom. The post was prompted by the jury's conclusion in a lawsuit over what appears to be an automotive software glitch that the carmaker is liable.

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