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this paper was published as Walicki, M.A. and Meldal, S., 1995, Nondeterministic Operators in Algebraic Frameworks, Tehnical Report No. CSL--TR--95--664, Stanford University

This paper traces the important steps in the history --up to around 1990-- of research on reasoning about programs. The main focus is on sequential imperative programs but some comments are made on concurrency. Initially, researchers focussed on ways of verifying that a program satisfies its specification (or that two programs were equivalent). Over time it became clear that post facto verification is only practical for small programs and attention turned to verification methods which support the development of programs; for larger programs it is necessary to exploit a notation of compositionality. Coping with concurrent algorithms is much more challenging -- this and other extensions are considered briefly. The main thesis of this paper is that the idea of reasoning about programs has been around since they were first written; the search has been to find tractable methods.

This paper traces the important steps in the history --up to around 1990-- of research on reasoning about programs. The main focus is on sequential imperative programs but some comments are made on concurrency. Initially, researchers focussed on ways of verifying that a program satifies its specification (or that two programs were equivalent). Over time it has become clear that post facto verification is only practical for small programs and attention turned to verification methods which support the development of programs; for larger programs it is necesary to exploit a notion of composability.

This paper describes a rely-guarantee proof to show that Simpson's 4-slot single-reader, single-writer ACM is Lamport atomic (as described fully in the paper). First an abstract ACM speci cation is proved Lamport atomic using an exhaustive assertional method. A formal model of Simpson's 4-slot is then given and this has been proved to be a re nement of the abstract speci cation using Nipkow's retrieve relation rule. Simpson's 4-slot is then shown to be Lamport atomic using an interleaved concurrency rely-guarantee proof method for shared variable concurrency.

This paper shows how formal methods ideas can be used to clarify basic notions used in the field of dependability. Central to this endeavour is fixing a notion of system. Relationships between systems are also considered: in particular, the importance of the situation where one system is generated by another (possibly human) system is explored.

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Abstract not found