Standards and techniques for object-oriented formal specification

Abstract

The authors discuss the significance and application of object-oriented formal specification languages to general software engineering projects and particularly to a safety-critical and mission-critical systems. They consider the role that standardisation of such languages could play in promoting their effective uptake. They give syntactic and semantic details of two object-oriented specification languages: Object-Z and Z++, and of the object-based specification language B. Aspects of these languages are considered as inputs to an eventual standard framework for such languages. These languages have been used for a wide variety of systems, from data-processing to artificial intelligence and communication protocols. They give simple examples of specifications in these languages to support a comparative evaluation.<>