Peter D. Mosses - Böcker

Action Semantics is a novel approach to the formal description of programming languages. Its abstractness is at an intermediate level, between that of denotational and operational semantics. Action Semantics has considerable pragmatic advantages over all previous approaches, in its comprehensibility and accessibility, and especially in the usefulness of its semantic descriptions of realistic programming languages. In this volume, Dr Peter Mosses gives a thorough introduction to action semantics, and provides substantial illustrations of its use. Graduates of computer science or maths who have an interest in the semantics of programming languages will find Action Semantics a most helpful book.

CASL, the Common Algebraic Specification Language, was designed by the members of CoFI, the Common Framework Initiative for algebraic specification and development, and is a general-purpose language for practical use in software development for specifying both requirements and design. CASL is already regarded as a de facto standard, and various sublanguages and extensions are available for specific tasks. This book illustrates and discusses how to write CASL specifications. The authors first describe the origins, aims and scope of CoFI, and review the main concepts of algebraic specification languages. The main part of the book explains CASL specifications, with chapters on loose, generated and free specifications, partial functions, sub- and supersorts, structuring specifications, genericity and reusability, architectural specifications, and version control. The final chapters deal with tool support and libraries, and present a realistic case study involving the standard benchmark for comparing specification frameworks. The book is aimed at software researchers and professionals, and follows a tutorial style with highlighted points, illustrative examples, and a full specification and library index. A separate, complementary LNCS volume contains the CASL Reference Manual.

CASL, the Common Algebraic Specification Language, was designed by the members of CoFI, the Common Framework Initiative for algebraic specification and development, and is a general-purpose language for practical use in software development for specifying both requirements and design. CASL is already regarded as a de facto standard, and various sublanguages and extensions are available for specific tasks.This reference manual presents a detailed documentation of the CASL specification formalism. It reviews the main underlying concepts, and carefully summarizes the intended meaning of each construct of CASL. The book formally defines both the syntax and semantics of CASL, and presents a logic for reasoning about CASL specifications. Furthermore, extensive libraries of CASL specifications of basic data types are provided as well as a comprehensive annotated bibliography of CoFI publications.As a separate, complementary book LNCS 2900 presents a tutorial introduction to CASL, the CASL User Manual.

This volume presents the proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on the Theory and Practice of Software Engineering, TAPSOFT '95, held in Aarhus, Denmark in May 1995. TAPSOFT '95 celebrates the 10th anniversary of this conference series started in Berlin in 1985 to bring together theoretical computer scientists and software engineers (researchers and practitioners) with a view to discussing how formal methods can usefully be applied in software development.The volume contains seven invited papers, among them one by Vaugham Pratt on the recently revealed bug in the Pentium chip, and 44 revised full papers selected from a total of 147 submissions. In addition the TAPSOFT '95 proceedings contains 10 tool descriptions.