A formal methodology is presented for the systematic evolution of modular Standard ML programs from specifications by means of verified refinement steps, in the framework of the Extended ML specification language. Program development proceeds via a sequence of design (modular decomposition), coding and refinement steps. For each of these three kinds of steps, conditions are given which ensure the correctness of the result. These conditions seem to be as weak as possible under the constraint of being expressible as "local" interface matching requirements. Interfaces are only required to match up to behavioural equivalence, which is seen as vital to the use of data abstraction in program development. Copyright c fl 1989 by D. Sannella and A. Tarlecki. All rights reserved. An extended abstract of this paper will appear in Proc. Colloq. on Current Issues in Programming Languages, Joint Conf. on Theory and Practice of Software Development (TAPSOFT), Barcelona, Springer LNCS (1989)....

. Within the KORSO project we have developed the object specification language TROLL light which allows to describe the part of the world to be modeled as a community of concurrently existing and communicating objects. Recently, we have worked out the basic notions of a pure algebraic semantics for our language. The main underlying idea is to present a transition system where the states represent the states of the specified information system, and state transitions are caused by the occurrence of finite sets of events. This semantics is formulated by representing states and state transitions as algebras. The various constructs of TROLL light are unified to general axioms restricting the possible interpretations for TROLL light object descriptions. 1 Introduction The information system development process can be divided into two phases: The requirements and the design engineering phase. At the end of the requirements engineering phase, a first formal description of the system to be dev...

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...