The focus of this chapter is the incremental presentation of partial firstorder logic, seen as a powerful framework where the specification of most data types can be directly represented in the most natural way. Both model theory and logical deduction are described in full detail. Alternatives to partiality, like (variants of) error algebras and order-sortedness are also discussed, showing their uses and limitations. Moreover, both the total and the partial (positive) conditional fragment are investigated in detail, and in particular the existence of initial (free) models for such restricted logical paradigms is proved. Some more powerful algebraic frameworks are sketched at the end. Equational specifications introduced in last chapter, are a powerful tool to represent the most common data types used in programming languages and their semantics. Indeed, Bergstra and Tucker have shown in a series of papers (see [BT87] for a complete exposition of results) that a data type is semicompu...

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Data Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 4.5.4 Special Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 4.6 Semantics of Programming Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 4.6.1 Semantics of Ada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 4.6.2 Action Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 4.7 Specification Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 4.7.1 Early Algebraic Specification Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 4.7.2 Recent Algebraic Specification Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 4.7.3 The Common Framework Initiative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 5 Methodology 57 5.1 Development Phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 5.1.1 Applica...

The paper presents a new way to model partial operations by use of nondeterminism: a partial operation is modeled as a nondeterministic operation returning, possibly, any value of the carrier. We introduce an institution of multialgebras MA (modelling nondeterministic operations by set-valued functions) and illustrate the flexibility of our approach by examples showing uniform treatment of strictness, non-strictness and various error handling. We present a methodology for specification development from an abstract specification to low level error handling. We also study the conditions for MA specifications to ensure the existence of initial models. Finally we relate MA to other institutions, in particular, we show embedding of partial algebras and membership algebras into MA. Applying institution transformation instead of embedding leads to the possibility of resuing partial algebra specifications in the proposed framework -- a partial algebra specification can be conservatively (prese...