Correct-by-construction pretty-printing

Danielsson, Nils Anders

doi:10.1145/2502409.2502410

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…In subsequent work, Tan and Morrisett [2018] extended this DSL to support bidirectional grammars in order to provide a uniform language for specifying and generating both decoders and encoders, proving a similar notion of consistency to what we present here. Danielsson [2013], on the other hand, shows how to extend traditional approaches to derive correct-by-construction pretty-printers, whose output is guaranteed to be parsable into the original value by a user-supplied context-free grammar. In the FliPpr language [Matsuda and Wang 2018], instead of supplying the grammar, users annotate a pretty-printer with additional directives specifying how to parse non-pretty input; the annotated program is then automatically inverted to generate a context-free grammar.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narcissus: correct-by-construction derivation of decoders and encoders from binary formats

Delaware

Suriyakarn

Pit-Claudel

et al. 2019

Proc. ACM Program. Lang.

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It is a neat result from functional programming that libraries of parser combinators can support rapid construction of decoders for quite a range of formats. With a little more work, the same combinator program can denote both a decoder and an encoder. Unfortunately, the real world is full of gnarly formats, as with the packet formats that make up the standard Internet protocol stack. Most past parser-combinator approaches cannot handle these formats, and the few exceptions require redundancy ś one part of the natural grammar needs to be hand-translated into hints in multiple parts of a parser program. We show how to recover very natural and nonredundant format specifications, covering all popular network packet formats and generating both decoders and encoders automatically. The catch is that we use the Coq proof assistant to derive both kinds of artifacts using tactics, automatically, in a way that guarantees that they form inverses of each other. We used our approach to reimplement packet processing for a full Internet protocol stack, inserting our replacement into the OCaml-based MirageOS unikernel, resulting in minimal performance degradation. ] that aim to reduce opportunities for user error in writing encoders and decoders, but these systems are quite tricky to get right and have themselves been sources of serious security bugs [CVE 2016].Combinator libraries are an alternative approach to the rapid development of parsers which has proven particularly popular in the functional-programming community [Leijen and Meijer 2001]. This approach has been adapted to generate both parsers and pretty printers from single programs [Kennedy 2004;Rendel and Ostermann 2010]. Unfortunately, unverified combinator libraries suffer from the same potential for bugs as code-generation frameworks, with the additional possibility for users to introduce errors when extending the library with new combinators. This paper presents Narcissus, a combinator-style framework for the Coq proof assistant that eliminates the possibility of such bugs, enabling the derivation of encoders and decoders that are correct by construction. Each derived encoder and decoder is backed by a machine-checked functionalcorrectness proof, and Narcissus leverages Coq's proof automation to help automate both the construction of encoders and decoders and their correctness proofs. Key to our approach is how it propagates information through a derivation, in order to generate decoders and encoders for the sorts of non-context-free languages that often appear in standard networking protocols.We begin by introducing the key features of Narcissus with a series of increasingly complex examples, leading to a hypothetical format of packets sent by a temperature sensor to a smart home controller. In order to build up the reader's intuition, we deliberately delay a discussion of the full details of our approach until Section 2. The code accompanying our tour is included in the Narcissus repository 1 in the src/Narcissus/Examples/README.v file, and can be run in Coq ver...

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narcissus: correct-by-construction derivation of decoders and encoders from binary formats

Delaware

Suriyakarn

Pit-Claudel

et al. 2019

Proc. ACM Program. Lang.

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“…Different approaches have been proposed to derive prettier [26], and correct-by-construction [7] pretty-printers. However, these approaches are aimed at traditional programming languages, and might require further adaptations to be applied to layout-sensitive languages.…”

Section: Pretty-printingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Declarative specification of indentation rules: a tooling perspective on parsing and pretty-printing layout-sensitive languages

Amorim

Steindorfer

Erdweg

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering

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In layout-sensitive languages, the indentation of an expression or statement can influence how a program is parsed. While some of these languages (e.g., Haskell and Python) have been widely adopted, there is little support for software language engineers in building tools for layout-sensitive languages. As a result, parsers, pretty-printers, program analyses, and refactoring tools often need to be handwritten, which decreases the maintainability and extensibility of these tools. Even state-of-the-art language workbenches have little support for layout-sensitive languages, restricting the development and prototyping of such languages. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to declarative specification of layout-sensitive languages using layout declarations. Layout declarations are high-level specifications of indentation rules that abstract from low-level technicalities. We show how to derive an efficient layout-sensitive generalized parser and a corresponding pretty-printer automatically from a language specification with layout declarations. We validate our approach in a case-study using a syntax definition for the Haskell programming language, investigating the performance of the generated parser and the correctness of the generated pretty-printer against 22191 Haskell files.

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“…This has directly inspired some of our terminology regarding semi-partial isomorphisms. Danielsson [2013] has shown how to write a pretty printing library that guarantees a similar round trip property.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generic packet descriptions: verified parsing and pretty printing of low-level data

Geest

Swierstra

2017

Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Type-Driven Development

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Complex protocols describing the communication or storage of binary data are difficult to describe precisely. This paper presents a collection of data types for describing a binary data formats; the corresponding parser and pretty printer are generated automatically from a data description. By embedding these data types in a general purpose dependently typed programming language, we can verify once and for all that the parsers and pretty printers generated in this style are correct by construction. To validate our results, we show how to write a verified parser of the IPv4 network protocol.

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Correct-by-construction pretty-printing

Cited by 7 publications

References 13 publications

Narcissus: correct-by-construction derivation of decoders and encoders from binary formats

Narcissus: correct-by-construction derivation of decoders and encoders from binary formats

Declarative specification of indentation rules: a tooling perspective on parsing and pretty-printing layout-sensitive languages

Generic packet descriptions: verified parsing and pretty printing of low-level data

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