Abstract

A brief overview of the science of formal program verification is presented, a topic close to the heart of Derrick Kourie to whom this article is dedicated in honour of his sixtieth birthday. No account would do justice to this topic without referring to the well-known Floyd-Hoare axiomatic approach to the verification and construction of programs. The specification of a program in terms of a precondition, program statement and postcondition is touched on and is followed by specification methods employed during the earlier phases of system development. Reasoning about the properties of a specification is a rewarding exercise since it may lead to useful insights. Modern specification languages often support set-theoretic constructs and these pose demanding challenges to automated reasoning programs. To this end the science of Automated Reasoning has made remarkable progress as far as tool usage is concerned.

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