Making formal software specification easy

Abstract

Even after so many years of research and development in building formal software specification languages, they are not yet popular in the industry for real-world applications. The number of reported success of using formal methods in industrial applications still remains very low. The reasons include: difficulty in learning new and complex mathematical notations, scarcity of experts in the field and difficulty in reviewing large specifications written in mathematical notations. In order to solve the above problems, this paper suggests use of high level programming languages as a formal specification language. Also, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique, three applications in nuclear industry are also presented.

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