This book presents the main results of Project 1158 "ATES" in the Subprogramme "Software Technology" of ESPRIT, the European Strategic Programme for Research and Development in Information Technology supported by the European Communities. The ATES system integrates formal proof techniques and abstraction mechanisms within a common framework to create an environment for scientific software design. It focuses upon recent developments concerning abstraction of data types, data base management, specification and program verification. A finite element software library has been developed to evaluate the potential of these advances for large-scale scientific and technical software packages. The systematic and pragmatic approach to software design suggested by the ATES method may help software engineers to increase the quality of industrial software, by using on a wider scale abstract programming languages and compliance checking techniques.
