A Formal Type System for Java.

Abstract

The primary objective of this paper is threefold: First, we present an evaluation of the state of the art on Java static semantics. Accordingly, we discuss the completeness and the soundness of the most prominent proposals recently advanced in the literature. Moreover, we discuss their compliance with respect to the Java language specification. Second, we report a brief evaluation of the official Java language specification. Third, we show how the definition of a realistic static semantics for full Java could be addressed. We exhibit the technical difficulties and discuss the semantic traits that could be used to address them.

Formal Semantics for Java-like Languages and Research Opportunities

“…Considering the growth in adoption of Java language for large projects, many applications have reached a level of complexity for which testing, code reviews, and human inspection are no longer sufficient quality-assurance guarantees. This problem increases the need for tools that employ static analysis techniques, aiming to explore all possibilities in an application, in order to guarantee the absence of unexpected behaviors [4]. Normally, developing and using these tools is a difficult task to be undertaken considering certain sizes of problems.…”