Writing Larch interface language specifications
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
HOPL-II The second ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages
History of programming languages---II
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A data abstraction introduces a data type with a hidden representation. Specifications of data abstractions are required to allow the data to be described and used without reference to the underlying representation. There are two main approaches to specifying data abstractions, the abstract model approach and the axiomatic approach. This thesis is concerned with the problems of formalizing and extending the abstract model approach. A formally defined language for writing abstract model specifications is presented. The correctness of an implementation with respect to an abstract model specification is defined, and a method for proving the correctness of implementations is proposed. Our formulation treats data abstractions with operations that can dynamically create new data objects, modify the properties of existing data objects, and raise exception conditions when presented with unusual input values.