Practical Suggestions for Writing Understandable, Correct Formal Specifications.

Abstract

The first half of this report is tutorial. It describes the three major classes of formal specification languages and argues that understandability is critical for formal specifications. Reasons why they are difficult to understand are identified, and practical suggestions for making them more understandable follow from that. The suggestions are illustrated by the specification of a pattern-matching facility. Three practical suggestions for checking the correctness of formal specifications follow. (Author)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 1980
Accession Number
ADA090551

Entities

People

  • Ralph M. Weischedel

Organizations

  • University of Delaware

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Human Systems
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Languages
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Databases
  • Formal Languages
  • High Level Languages
  • Language
  • Natural Languages
  • Operating Systems
  • Programming Languages
  • Software Development
  • Specifications
  • System Software

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Theoretical Analysis.