A theory and practice of program development

Publication date 21 January 1998

Introductory exposition (textbooks, tutorial papers, etc.) pertaining to computer science (68-01) General topics in the theory of software (68N01)

Review text

The book provides an insight into the software development and gives the methods a rigurous justification. The language described is based on VDM-SL and it has been updated with a more modern syntax. The book shows that it is possible to derive both a specification and to give a formal explanation of all of the development steps used in the producing code from a specification. All of these are presented in 23 chapters. In the first four chapters the author presents a small programming language, some primitive commands, guarded commands and recursive definitions. In the following 6 chapters, the author introduces program refinement, by refining the basic statements, refinement rules for blocks, for semicolon, for iteration and for using recursion. To illustrate the use of the rules that have been derived, beginning with the chapter 12 the author considers some examples: integer multiplication, the factorial problem, searching and sorting an array. In chapter 17 (and the following) is treated the problem of implementing the abstract data structures (including stacks and queues) and dynamic data structures. The advantage of semantic approach using weakest pre-conditions is all the time emphasized and rigorously justified.

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