Software Specification

Abstract

designs that refined a specification. Those ideas were later formalised by Ib’s colleague Carroll Morgan in his refinement calculus [Morgan 1988].8 A further line of research was sparked as part of the specification of checkpointing within the CICS transaction processing system using Tony’s language CSP [Hoare 1985a]. Checkpoints were needed to allow the system to restart in a valid state when a system failure occurred. The version of CSP at that time did not provide a straightforward approach to specifying checkpoints, but Tony was able to extend CSP to include interrupts [Hoare 1985a, section 5.4], which provided a general mechanism that could be used for specifying checkpoints. 11.10 Conclusions From his early days of research in computing Tony has been motivated to solve real-world problems by using mathematically based theories to give a firm founda­ tion for reasoning about programs and specifications, and the refinement relation between them. ∙ Tony’s research on reasoning about programs using triples of the form p{c}q [Hoare 1969] formed the basis for specifying operations using preconditions and postconditions, ∙ Tony’s research on defining programming language data types via their alge­ bra properties [Hoare 1972b] pioneered the use of algebraic specifications of data types, and ∙ Tony’s research on the correctness of data representations pioneered the use of abstract data structures and types [Hoare 1972a]. Approaches to both formal specification of computer systems and refinement of those specifications to code owe much to Tony’s pioneering work in the field. References J.-R. Abrial. 1982. The Specification Language Z: Basic Library. Internal report, Programming Research Group, Oxford University. J.-R. Abrial, S. A. Schuman, and B. Meyer. 1980. Specification language. In R. M. McKeag and A. M. Macnaghten (Eds.), On the Construction of Programs: An Advanced Course. Cambridge University Press, UK, 343–410. R.-J. Back. 1980. Correctness Preserving Program Refinements: Proof Theory and Applications. Tract 131, Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam. 8. Similar ideas were previously explored by others [Schwarz 1977, Back 1980, Morris 1987]. 268 Chapter 11 Software Specification M. B. Carpenter and H. K. Hallman. 1985. Quality emphasis at IBM’s Software Engineering Institute. IBM Syst. J. 24, 2, 121–133. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1147/sj.242.0121. B. P. Collins, J. E. Nicholls, and I. H. Sørensen. 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