Current research in specifications is emphasizing the practical use of formal specifications in program design. One way to encourage their use in practice is to provide specification languages that are accessible to both designers and programmers. With this goal in mind, the Larch family of formal specification languages has evolved to support a two-tiered approach to writing specifications. This approach separates the specification of state transformations and programming language dependen-cies from the specification of underlying abstractions. Thus, each member of the Larch family has a subset derived from a programming language and another subset independent of any programming languages. We call the former interface languages, and the latter the Larch Shared Language. This paper focuses on Larch interface language specifications. Through examples, we illustrate some salient features of Larch/CLU, a Larch interface language for the programming language CLU. We give an example of writing an interface specification following the two-tiered approach and discuss in detail issues involved in writing interface specifications and their interaction with their Shared Language components.

Formal specifications of operating system interfaces can be a useful part of their documentation. We illustrate this by documenting the Threads synchronization primitives of the Taos operating system. We start with an informal description, present a way to formally specify interfaces in concurrent systems, and then give a formal specification of the synchronization primitives. We briefly discuss both the implementation and what we have learned from using the specification for more than a year. Our main conclusion is that programmers untrained in reading formal specifications have found this one helpful in getting their work done. iii Introduction The careful documentation of interfaces is an important step in the production of software upon which other software is to be built. If people are to use software without having to understand its implementation, documentation must convey semantic as well as syntactic information. When the software involves concurrency, adequate documentatio...

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This report describes a Larch interface language (LM3) for the Modula-3 programming language. LM3 is a complete example of a Larch interface language and addresses areas previously ignored in interface language definition, such as the specification of non-atomic procedures and object types. We give a complete definition of the syntax and illustrate it with some straightforward examples. We also give translation functions from LM3 specifications to Larch Shared Language traits and show their use for type checking. Finally, we present example specifications of standard Modula-3 interfaces. To remove the possibility of misunderstanding, this report presents LM3 using its base syntax and does not use any syntactic sugar. In practice, such sugar is convenient and the checker accepts a sugared form as well as the raw form presented here. Contents 1 Introduction 3 1.1 Background : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 3 1.2 The relationship between Modula-3 and LM3 : : : :...

We sketch a method for deduction-oriented software and system development The method incorporates formal machine-supported specification and verification as activities in software and systems development. We describe experiences in applying this method. These experiences have been gained by using the LP, the Larch proof assistant, as a tool for a number of small and medium size case studies for the formal development of software and systems. LP is used for the verification of the development steps. These case studies include z quicksort, z the majority vote problem, z code generation by a compiler and its correctness, z an interactive queue and its refinement into a network. The developments range over levels of requirement specifications, designs and abstract implementations. The main issues are questions of a development method and how to make good use of a formal tool like LP in a goal-directed way within the development. We further discuss of the value of advanced specific...

We describe the problems encountered in the design of Larch/C++, especially its object-oriented features. We discuss a range of possible solutions to these problems, and give the rationale for our particular solutions. We also present examples of Larch/C++ specifications and discuss differences from Larch/C.

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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...