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Helpers

Forge and Frglet provide a number of built-in helpers to ease your work in the language.

Sequences

A sequence is a field f of the form f: pfunc Int -> A (where A can be any sig) such that:

  • f is a partial function (i.e., each Int has at most one corresponding entry);
  • no index Int is less than zero; and
  • indexes are contiguous (e.g., if there are entries at index 1 and index 3, there must be one at index 2).

You can think of sequences as roughly analogous to fixed-size arrays in a language like Java. To tell Forge that a partial-function field f is a sequence, use the isSeqOf predicate.

Hint: make sure that you use isSeqOf in any test or run that you want to enforce that f is a sequence. The isSeqOf predicate is just another constraint: it's not a persistent declaration like pfunc is.

isSeqOf

  • isSeqOf[f, A]: a predicate that holds if and only if f is a sequence of values in A.

Sequence Helpers

The following helpers are also available, but should only be used when f is a sequence:

Sequence Helper Functions:

  • seqFirst[f]: returns the first element of f, i.e. f[0].
  • seqLast[f]: returns the last element of f.
  • indsOf[f, e]: returns all the indices of e in f.
  • idxOf[f, e]: returns the first index of e in f.
  • lastIdxOf[f, e]: returns the last index of e in f.
  • elems[f]: returns all the elements of f.
  • inds[f]: returns all the indices of f.

Sequence Helper Predicates:

  • isEmpty[f]: true if and only if sequence f is empty.
  • hasDups[f]: true if and only if sequence f has duplicates (i.e., there are at least two indices that point to the same value).

Reachability

Forge provides a convenient way to speak of an object being reachable via fields of other objects.

  • reachable[a, b, f]: object a is reachable from b through recursively applying field f. This predicate only works if a.f is well-defined.
  • reachable[a, b, f1, f2, ...]: an extended version of reachable which supports using more than one field to reach a from b.

The extended version of reachable is useful if you wish to model, e.g., binary trees where nodes have a left and right field. In such a model, if you want to quantify over all descendents of a parent node, you might write all n: Node | reachable[n, parent, left, right].

Order matters!

Beware: the order of arguments in reachable matters! The first argument is the object to be reached, and the second argument is the starting object. Getting these reversed is a common source of errors.

The value none is reachable from anything

Beware: if you pass something that might be none as the first argument of reachable, in such cases reachable will evaluate to true. E.g., reachable[p.spouse, p, father] will evaluate to true if p happens to be unmarried.