[Back]


Talks and Poster Presentations (with Proceedings-Entry):

M.A. Ertl:
"The Intended Meaning of Undefined Behaviour in C Programs";
Talk: 19. Kolloquium Programmiersprachen und Grundlagen der Programmierung (KPS'17), Weimar; 2017-09-25 - 2017-09-27; in: "19. Kolloquium Programmiersprachen und Grundlagen der Programmierung (KPS'17)", (2017), 20 - 28.



English abstract:
All significant C programs contain undefined
behaviour. There are conflicting positions about how
to deal with that: One position is that all these
programs are broken and may be compiled to arbitrary
code. Another position is that tested and working
programs should continue to work as intended by the
programmer with future versions of the same C
compiler. In that context the advocates of the first
position often claim that they do not know the
intended meaning of a program with undefined
behaviour. This paper explores this topic in greater
depth. The goal is to preserve the behaviour of
existing, tested programs. It is achieved by letting
the compiler define a consistent mapping of C
operations to machine code; and the compiler then
has to stick to this behaviour during optimizations
and in future releases.


Electronic version of the publication:
https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_277342.pdf


Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.