Reasoning about call-by-value: a missing result in the history of Hoare's logic

Abstract

We provide a sound and relatively complete Hoare-like proof system for reasoning about partial correctness of recursive procedures in presence of local variables and the call-by-value parameter mechanism, and in which the correctness proofs are linear in the length of the program. We argue that in spite of the fact that Hoare-like proof systems for recursive procedures were intensively studied, no such proof system has been proposed in the literature.