The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Simplify: a theorem prover for program checking
Abstract
This article provides a detailed description of the automatic theorem prover Simplify, which is the proof engine of the Extended Static Checkers ESC/Java and ESC/Modula-3. Simplify uses the Nelson--Oppen method to combine decision procedures for several important theories, and also employs a matcher to reason about quantifiers. Instead of conventional matching in a term DAG, Simplify matches up to equivalence in an E-graph, which detects many relevant pattern instances that would be missed by the conventional approach. The article describes two techniques, error context reporting and error localization, for helping the user to determine the reason that a false conjecture is false. The article includes detailed performance figures on conjectures derived from realistic program-checking problems.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
de Moura, L., & Bjørner, N. (2008) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-540-78800-3_24 · Cited by 6,595
Satisfiability Modulo Theories
Barrett, C., & Tinelli, C. (2018) · Handbook of Model Checking · doi:10.1007/978-3-319-10575-8_11 · Cited by 1,122
Dafny: An Automatic Program Verifier for Functional Correctness
Leino, K. R. M. (2010) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-17511-4_20 · Cited by 940
Rodin: an open toolset for modelling and reasoning in Event-B
Abrial, J.-R., Butler, M., Hallerstede, S., Hoang, T. S., Mehta, F., & Voisin, L. (2010) · International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer · doi:10.1007/s10009-010-0145-y · Cited by 688
Dutertre, B. (2014) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-319-08867-9_49 · Cited by 398
Metadata
- Authors
- Detlefs, D., Nelson, G., & Saxe, J. B.
- Venue
- Journal of the ACM
- Published
- 2005-05
- Volume
- 52
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 365-473
- ISSN
- 0004-5411 (ISSN-L)
- 1557-735X
- OpenAlex
- W2055477538
- Cited by
- 786
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 84.85
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Simplify: a theorem prover for program checking. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/1066100.1066102
- The paper
- Detlefs, D., Nelson, G., & Saxe, J. B. (2005). Simplify: a theorem prover for program checking. Journal of the ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/1066100.1066102
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
