Formal specification as a design tool

  • Authors:
  • John Guttag;J. J. Horning

  • Affiliations:
  • MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, Cambridge, MA;Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • POPL '80 Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
  • Year:
  • 1980

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Abstract

The formulation and analysis of a design specification is almost always of more utility than the verification of the consistency of a program with its specification. Good specification tools can assist in this process, but have generally not been proposed and evaluated in this light. In this paper we outline a specification language combining algebraic axioms and predicate transformers, present part of a non-trivial example (the specification of a high-level interface to a display), and finally discuss the analysis of this specification.