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Teaching formal programming to first year computer science students

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Published:01 March 1996Publication History
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Abstract

The integration of formal methods into the undergraduate curriculum has been slow considering the benefits they offer. One reason for this is that the limited number of relevant textbooks, although excellent, are rather terse. As a result, we have developed various techniques for teaching formal programming in which each step is fully justified by appealing to a design rule or heuristic. Another technique we have developed is 'programming by rule' using generic templates to solve problems of similar structure---rather like differentiation by rule. Our experience to date has been encouraging. We outline some of these techniques and give examples of them in practice.

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  1. Teaching formal programming to first year computer science students

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          • Published in

            cover image ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
            ACM SIGCSE Bulletin  Volume 28, Issue 1
            March 1996
            379 pages
            ISSN:0097-8418
            DOI:10.1145/236462
            Issue’s Table of Contents
            • cover image ACM Conferences
              SIGCSE '96: Proceedings of the twenty-seventh SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
              March 1996
              447 pages
              ISBN:089791757X
              DOI:10.1145/236452

            Copyright © 1996 ACM

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            Association for Computing Machinery

            New York, NY, United States

            Publication History

            • Published: 1 March 1996

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