Refinement and Separation Contexts

Ivana Mijajlovic, Noah Torp-Smith, Peter W. O'Hearn

Abstract: A separation context is a client program which does not dereference internals of a module with which it interacts. We use certain “precise” relations to unambiguously describe the storage of a module and prove that separation contexts preserve such relations. We also show that a simulation theorem holds for separation contexts, while this is not the case for arbitrary client programs.