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Correctness by construction: putting engineering (back) into software

Published:04 November 2007Publication History
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Abstract

This presentation will look at the many problems of designing and building high-integrity software and the processes, languages and tools that are currently used. The need to "engineer" our software implies that discipline and reasoning are required, yet most processes and languages seem to obstruct rather than assist such attempts. To help understand why, we consider the history of programming language design, and how this has shaped the way we think about software and constrained our ability to engineer it. In this generally gloomy picture some good news can be found: the emergence of design-by-contract facilities in languages such as Eiffel and SPARK has made a strong impact in some niche areas. In those areas, we have made a rather unusual observation: customers (some having "flirted" with this week's fashionable approach) are "coming back to Ada", recognizing the language's strengths, particularly for high-integrity applications. The presentation will close by considering why Praxis still uses (and chooses) Ada, and the role that Ada has to play in the future of high-integrity software.

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  • Published in

    cover image ACM SIGAda Ada Letters
    ACM SIGAda Ada Letters  Volume XXVII, Issue 3
    SIGAda '07
    December 2007
    93 pages
    ISSN:1094-3641
    DOI:10.1145/1315607
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    • cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGAda '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM international conference on SIGAda annual international conference
      November 2007
      116 pages
      ISBN:9781595938763
      DOI:10.1145/1315580

    Copyright © 2007 ACM

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    • Published: 4 November 2007

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