Abstract

As interest in components and composition-related methods is growing rapidly, it is not always clear what the goals (and the corresponding di#culties) actually are. If composition is to become central in the future of software engineering, we need to better identify the fundamental issues that are related to it, before we attempt to solve them as they occur in object-oriented systems or in concurrent and reactive systems. In this paper, we present our formulation of some of the composition problems in a context of formal methods and program specification and verification. This formalization is based on predicate calculus and predicate transformers and aims at remaining as general as possible. This way, we hope to better understand some of the fundamental issues of composition and component-based reasoning.

Citations