Abstract Exception handling is a key feature in modern programming languages. Exceptions can be used to deal with errors, or as a means to control the flow of execution of a program. Since they might unexpectedly terminate a program, unhandled exceptions are a serious safety concern. We propose a static analysis to detect uncaught exceptions in functional programs, that is defined as an abstract interpreter. It computes a description of the values potentially returned by a program using a novel abstract domain, that can express inductively defined sets of values. Simultaneously, the analysis infers the possibly raised exceptions, by computing in theabstract exception monad. This abstract interpreter has been implemented as an effective static analyser for a large subset of programs, that supports mutable data types, the module system, and dynamically extensible data types such as the exception type. The analyser has been evaluated on several hundreds of programs.

Rewriting is a widely established formalism with major applications in computer science. It is indeed a staple of many formal verification applications as it is especially well suited to describe program semantics and transformations. In particular, constructor based term rewriting systems are generally used to illustrate the behaviour of functional programs.