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Topics * what this book is about, * its intended audience, * what
the reader ought to know, * how the book is organized, *
acknowledgements. Specifications express information about a
program that is not normally part of the program, and often cannot
be expressed in a programming lan guage. In the past, the word
"specification" has sometimes been used to refer to somewhat vague
documentation written in English. But today it indicates a precise
statement, written in a machine processable language, about the
purpose and behavior of a program. Specifications are written in
languages that are just as precise as programming languages, but
have additional capabilities that increase their power of
expression. The termi nology formal specification is sometimes used
to emphasize the modern meaning. For us, all specifications are
formal. The use of specifications as an integral part of a program
opens up a whole new area of programming - progmmming with
specifications. This book describes how to use specifications in
the process of building programs, debugging them, and interfacing
them with other programs. It deals with a new trend in programming
- the evolution of specification languages from the current
generation of programming languages. And it describes new
strategies and styles of programming that utilize specifications.
The trend is just beginning, and the reader, having finished this
book, will viii Preface certainly see that there is much yet to be
done and to be discovered about programming with specifications.
The book is devoted to a simplified set-theoretic version of
denotational semantics where sets are used in place of Scott's
reflexive domains and where jumps are described without
continuations. This approach has emerged as a reaction to the
sophisticated model of traditional semantics. It was also strongly
stimulated by the applications of denotational semantics and
especially by its software-industry oriented version known as VDM
(Vienna Development Method). The new approach was successfully
tested on several examples. Based on this approach the Polish
Academy of Sciences created the project MetaSoft aimed at the
development of a definitional metalanguage for software
engineering. The approach has also been chosen in the project RAISE
(ESPRIT) which aims at a similar goal. The book consists of two
parts. Part One is devoted to the mathematical foundations of the
future definitional metalanguage of MetaSoft. This part also
introduces an appropriate notation. Part Two shows the applications
of this metalanguage. There the denotational definition of a subset
of Pascal is discussed with particular emphasis on Pascal types.
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