Summary
A specification language typically contains sophisticated data types that are expensive or even impossible to implement. Their replacement with simpler or more efficiently implementable types during the programming process is called data refinement. We give a new formal definiton of data refinement and use it to derive some basic laws. The derived laws are constructive in that used in conjunction with the known laws of procedural refinement they allow us to calculate a new specification from a given one in which variables are to be replaced by other variables of a different type.
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Morris, J.M. Laws of data refinement. Acta Informatica 26, 287–308 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00276019
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00276019