Preface to Special Issue on Software Verification

The origins of software verification go back to the pioneers of Computing Science, von Neumann and Turing. The idea has been rediscovered several times since then, for example by McCarthy, Naur and Floyd. The ideals of verification have inspired half a century of productive computing research at the foundations of the subject. There are now flourishing research schools in computational logic, computer-aided proof, programming theory, formal semantics, specification and programming languages, programming methodology and software engineering. By the end of the last century, enormous progress had been made in verifi­ cation theory and in tools to assist in its application. The technology of proof was extended to include constraint solving and model checking, which were rou­ tinely exploited in the electronics industry to increase confidence in the absence of