Project under realisation:

Foundations of Algebraic Specification and Formal Software Development

Don Sannella and Andrzej Tarlecki

This is a monograph which presents mathematical foundations for formal software specification and development. It concentrates on developing basic concepts and studying their fundamental properties rather than on demonstrating how these are to be used in the practice of software construction which we regard as a very important but necessarily separate topic. As reflected in the title of the book, our primary motivation is the specification and development of software although many of the topics we discuss are applicable to hardware systems as well. The book is in the tradition of algebraic specification but deliberately diverges somewhat from what many people would regard as the mainstream of this subject. The more general view of software specification which it presents is one of its most important features.

The book is self-contained, although mathematical maturity and some acquaintance with the problems of software design are prerequisites. The intended audience is researchers, postgraduate students and final-year undergraduate students in computer science. It is not intended as a textbook although the preliminary chapters contain many exercises and may be used in this way.


Availability

The book is under development: all chapters exist in draft form, and some are essentially finished.

If you are seriously interested and willing to provide us with some comments, corrections, etc., you may contact us and ask for a copy of the chapters that are ready.

The list of chapters and their very brief description is here:

Contents




Wordle: algspecs



Don Sannella (dts@inf.ed.ac.uk)
Andrzej Tarlecki (tarlecki@mimuw.edu.pl)