Towards a Theory of Forward Error Recovery

When the state of a program in execution is accidentally altered, a recovery action may be needed before the execution can proceed on. Two approaches exist for the design of recovery actions: backward recovery consists of retrieving a previously saved correct state and restarting the computation; forward recovery consists of generating á (sufficiently) correct state from the current (not too) contaminated state. This paper presents a tentative framework for the study of forward error recovery and then discusses some preliminary results and some future research within the proposed framework.