Elusive but Coverable: The Recursion-Theoretic Structure of Complete Abstract Interpretations

Abstract

We study local completeness and incompleteness of abstract interpretations from a recursion-theoretic perspective. Local completeness weakens global completeness and captures the absence of precision loss for a specific precondition: abstract computation yields exactly what is obtained by abstracting the corresponding concrete computation. This enables compositional reasoning and rules out false positives in verification. We characterize the distinction between static and dynamic program analysis in terms of uniformly decidable operations and observe that the latter is uniformly decidable only for trivial abstractions. We then prove that the class of programs inducing a predicate transformer that is locally complete for a given non-trivial abstract domain is elusive in a precise recursion-theoretic sense: it is a productive set, hence not computably enumerable, and, under mild hypotheses, the same holds for its complement. In particular, the first class lies in $Π^0_2$ and the second in $Σ^0_2$. Unlike the usual examples of $Π^0_2$ properties, we show that the classes of locally complete programs admit decidable coverings. This makes it possible to construct, via program transformation, an effective enumeration of a representative subset of programs that entirely covers this class -- capturing from the outside a class that eludes enumeration from within.