Processing an Intermediate Representation Written in Lisp Ricardo Pena,˜ Santiago Saavedra, Jaime Sanchez-Hern´ andez´ Complutense University of Madrid, Spain∗
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[email protected] In the context of designing the verification platform CAVI-ART, we arrived to the need of deciding a textual format for our intermediate representation of programs. After considering several options, we finally decided to use S-expressions for that textual representation, and Common Lisp for processing it in order to obtain the verification conditions. In this paper, we discuss the benefits of this decision. S-expressions are homoiconic, i.e. they can be both considered as data and as code. We exploit this duality, and extensively use the facilities of the Common Lisp environment to make different processing with these textual representations. In particular, using a common compilation scheme we show that program execution, and verification condition generation, can be seen as two instantiations of the same generic process. 1 Introduction Building a verification platform such as CAVI-ART [7] is a challenging endeavour from many points of view. Some of the tasks require intensive research which can make advance the state of the art, as it is for instance the case of automatic invariant synthesis. Some others are not so challenging, but require a lot of pondering and discussion before arriving at a decision, in order to ensure that all the requirements have been taken into account. A bad or a too quick decision may have a profound influence in the rest of the activities, by doing them either more difficult, or longer, or more inefficient.