Eiffel: the language
Larch: languages and tools for formal specification
Larch: languages and tools for formal specification
Refactoring: improving the design of existing code
Refactoring: improving the design of existing code
JML (poster session): notations and tools supporting detailed design in Java
OOPSLA '00 Addendum to the 2000 proceedings of the conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications (Addendum)
Declaring and checking non-null types in an object-oriented language
OOPSLA '03 Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programing, systems, languages, and applications
How the design of JML accommodates both runtime assertion checking and formal verification
Science of Computer Programming - Formal methods for components and objects pragmatic aspects and applications
An overview of JML tools and applications
International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT) - Special section on formal methods for industrial critical systems
The spec# programming system: an overview
CASSIS'04 Proceedings of the 2004 international conference on Construction and Analysis of Safe, Secure, and Interoperable Smart Devices
Simplifying reasoning about objects with Tako
Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Specification and verification of component-based systems
Modular verification of higher-order methods with mandatory calls specified by model programs
Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems and applications
The KOA remote voting system: a summary of work to date
TGC'06 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Trustworthy global computing
Are practitioners writing contracts?
Rigorous Development of Complex Fault-Tolerant Systems
Extending OCL with null-references: towards a formal semantics for OCL 2.1
MODELS'09 Proceedings of the 2009 international conference on Models in Software Engineering
Non-null references by default in java: alleviating the nullity annotation burden
ECOOP'07 Proceedings of the 21st European conference on Object-Oriented Programming
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Based on our experiences and those of our peers, we hypothesized that in Java code, the majority of declarations that are of reference types are meant to be non-null. Unfortunately, the Java Modeling Language (JML), like most interface specification and object-oriented programming languages, assumes that such declarations are possibly-null by default. As a consequence, developers need to write specifications that are more verbose than necessary in order to accurately document their module interfaces. In practice, this results in module interfaces being left incompletely and inaccurately specified. In this paper we present the results of a study that confirms our hypothesis. Hence, we propose an adaptation to JML that preserves its language design goals and that allows developers to specify that declarations of reference types are to be interpreted as non-null by default. We explain how this default is safer and results in less writing on the part of specifiers than null-by-default. The paper also reports on an implementation of the proposal in some of the JML tools.