Pascal Gribomont

Applied Logics for Computer Science

Logic is intensively applied in many areas of computer science. Successful applications often lead to the question whether alternative logics could be more adequate than classical propositional and first-order logics. Not surprisingly, answering this question usually amounts to a trade-off between the expressive power of the new logic (usually stronger than the expressive power of classical logic) and its decidability properties (usually weaker). From this point of view, formal methods for program design and verification are an interesting field of applied logic and computer science since one can take advantage of the high expressive power of specific logics and also of the algorithmic tools available in classical logic; two examples will be given. We also illustrate how logic can be used directly as a programming language.