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An undergraduate course in formal methods: “description is our business”

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Published:01 March 1998Publication History
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Abstract

We present a new undergraduate course in formal methods which emphasizes software specification and description instead of formal program correctness or program derivation.This course is motivated by the idea that specifications play a key role in the software development process and that precise and clear descriptions of software systems and artifacts are important. It wants to show students that some simple notions from logic and mathematics (predicates and quantifiers, set theory, maps), together with appropriate constructs for defining software components and systems, can be useful for this purpose.The course is taught using the Spec notation [1] and we first discuss why we did not choose the ubiquitous Z notation. The content of the course is then presented, followed with a brief description of an on-line WWW system that was developed to help the students do the exercices presented in the course notes.

References

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          cover image ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
          ACM SIGCSE Bulletin  Volume 30, Issue 1
          Mar. 1998
          376 pages
          ISSN:0097-8418
          DOI:10.1145/274790
          Issue’s Table of Contents
          • cover image ACM Conferences
            SIGCSE '98: Proceedings of the twenty-ninth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
            March 1998
            396 pages
            ISBN:0897919947
            DOI:10.1145/273133

          Copyright © 1998 ACM

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          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

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          • Published: 1 March 1998

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