Abstract
Within the computer science community, it is a well-known fact that the cost to correct an error in a computer system increases dramatically as the system life cycle progresses. The cost of correcting an error increases by orders of magnitude as the system moves from the development stages of analysis and design, to become most expensive during the maintenance and operation phase. Formal specification and prototyping help to eliminate many of these errors in the very early stages of a project before any production-level code has been written.
Formal methods are used to diminish ambiguity, incompleteness, and inconsistency in a system. When used early in the system development process, they can reveal design flaws that otherwise might be discovered only during the costly testing and debugging phases. Even when using a formal specification one is left with the problem of validating the specification against the informal requirements. Consequently, after specifying the formal semantics of a proposed system a prototype should be built rapidly to validate the formal specification. Such a prototype enables us to test the specification with respect to its adequacy.
A common problem with software products is that the users of the system may not be fully aware of what they require and they may be unable to communicate their desires to the development team. Using a prototype, the user can interact with the system and can discover requirement deficiencies early, enabling rapid correction of the requirements.
The original goal of our research is to design a language for prototyping parallel algorithms to make parallel program design easier. We construct this tool in a somewhat unconventional way: the informal specification is followed by a formal specification, which serves as the basis for a prototype implementation before the production-level implementation is undertaken. In this paper we present the Object-Z specification of our parallel programming language and a prototype implementation with the set-oriented language ProSet. Note, therefore, that this paper presents more a case study than a fully developed methodology for the combination of a formal specification language and a prototyping language. The specified parallel programming language combines ProSet with Linda.
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© 1994 British Computer Society
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Hasselbring, W. (1994). Animation of Object-Z Specifications with a Set-Oriented Prototyping Language. In: Bowen, J.P., Hall, J.A. (eds) Z User Workshop, Cambridge 1994. Workshops in Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3452-7_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3452-7_20
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