[PPL-devel] Parma Polyhedra Library 0.9

[Roberto Bagnara]

The core development team is very pleased to announce the
availability of PPL 0.9, a new release of the Parma Polyhedra Library.

The key feature of this release is complete support for the domain of
rational grids.  Roughly speaking, a grid is the solution of a finite
system of congruence relations such as `x + y - 2*z = 3 (mod 6)'.
Grids can encode information about the patterns of distribution of the
values that program variables can take.  The implementation offered in
PPL 0.9 is, as far as we know, the first published one that is
functionally complete (i.e., providing all the required operations,
including a provably correct widening) for the purposes of program
analysis and verification.

The release includes also many portability improvement and a couple
of bug fixes.  The precise list of user-visible changes is below.
For more information, please come and visit the PPL web site at

        http://www.cs.unipr.it/ppl/

On behalf of all the past and present developers listed at
http://www.cs.unipr.it/ppl/Credits/ and in the file CREDITS,

       Roberto Bagnara  <bagnara at cs.unipr.it>
       Patricia M. Hill <hill at comp.leeds.ac.uk>
       Enea Zaffanella  <zaffanella at cs.unipr.it>


New and Changed Features
========================

o  The class Grid provides a complete implementation of the relational
    domain of rational grids.  This can represent all sets that can
    be expressed by the conjunction of a finite number of congruence
    relations.  Operations provided include everything that is needed
    in the field of static analysis and verification, including affine
    images, preimages and their generalizations, grid-difference and
    widening operators.  This is the first time such a complete domain
    is made freely available to the community.

o  Several important portability improvements.  Among other things,
    it is now possible to build only the static libraries or only
    the shared libraries.  (Notice that some interfaces depend on
    the availability of the shared libraries: these will not be built
    when shared libraries are disabled.)


Bugfixes
========

o  Fixed a bug whereby the SICStus Prolog interface could not be built
    on x86_64.

o  Fixed a bug in an internal method that, under some circumstances,
    could cause a wrong result to be computed.


-- 
Prof. Roberto Bagnara
Computer Science Group
Department of Mathematics, University of Parma, Italy
http://www.cs.unipr.it/~bagnara/
mailto:bagnara at cs.unipr.it