Abstract
We describe a foundation for refinement calculus where pro- grams and systems are described as contracts, carried out by a collection of interacting agents. The contract states explicitly what the agents are allowed to do, and who is to blame if things go wrong. A contract can be analyzed from the point of view of any participating agent or coalition of agents, to see what kind of goals the agents can achieve by following the contract. We give an intuitive overview of contracts in this setting, and then continue to describe the mathematical and logical foundations of the calculus. We show how contracts provide a unified framework for a number of seemingly different paradigms in computer science, such as concurrency, interactivity, games, temporal behavior vs input-output computation and high level system design.
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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Back, RJ. (2010). Refinement Calculus as a Theory of Contracts (Invited Paper) . In: Butterfield, A. (eds) Unifying Theories of Programming. UTP 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5713. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14521-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14521-6_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-14520-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-14521-6
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