As computers increasingly control the systems and services we depend upon within our daily lives like transport, communications, and the media, ensuring these systems function correctly is of utmost importance. This book consists of twelve chapters and one historical account that were presented at a workshop in London in 2015, marking the 25th anniversary of the European ESPRIT Basic Research project ‘ProCoS’ (Provably Correct Systems). The ProCoS I and II projects pioneered and accelerated the automation of verification techniques, resulting in a wide range of applications within many trades and sectors such as aerospace, electronics, communications, and retail. The following topics are covered: An historical account of the ProCoS project Hybrid Systems Correctness of Concurrent Algorithms Interfaces and Linking Automatic Verification Run-time Assertions Checking Formal and Semi-Formal Methods Provably Correct Systems provides researchers, designers and engineers with a complete overview of the ProCoS initiative, past and present, and explores current developments and perspectives within the field.

1 INTRODUCTION These proceedings are the result of a conference on Automating Systems Development held at Leicester Polytechnic, England on 14 to 16 April 1987. The conference was attended by over 170 delegates from industry and academia and it represents a comprehensive review of the state of the art of the use of the computer based tools for the analysis, design and construction of Information Systems (IS). Two parallel streams ran throughout the conference. The academic, or research, papers were the fruit of British, European and Canadian research, with some of the papers reflecting UK Government funded Alvey or European ESPRIT research projects. Two important touchstones guided the selection of academic papers. Firstly, they should be primarily concerned with system, rather than program, development. Secondly, they should be easily accessible to delegates and readers. We felt that formal mathematical papers had plenty of other opportunities for airing and publication. The second stream was the applied programme; a set of formal presentations given by leading software vendors and consultancies. It is clear that many advances in systems development are actually applied, rather than re search led. Thus it was important for delegates to hear how leading edge companies view the State of the Art. This was supported by a small exhibi tion area where certain vendors demonstrated the software they had intro duced in the formal presentation.

Contains papers presented at "Expert Systems 88", the eighth annual conference of the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Expert Systems, held in Brighton in December 1988. Covers many aspects of current work, in particular, theoretical topics, practical techniques and real applications of expert systems (a wide spectrum of commercial and industrial interest). The theme of the 1988 conference was "integrating with mainstream software development." No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book contains a refereed collection of thoroughly revised full papers based on the contributions accepted for presentation at the International Workshop on Studies of Software Design, held in conjunction with the 1993 International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE'93, in Baltimore, Maryland, in May 1993. The emphasis of the 13 papers included is on methods for studying, analyzing, and comparing designs and design methods; the topical focus is primarily on the software architecture level of design and on techniques suitable for dealing with large software systems. The book is organized in sections on architectures, tools, and design methods and opens with a detailed introduction by the volume editor.

Addressing general readers as well as software practitioners, "Software and Mind" discusses the fallacies of the mechanistic ideology and the degradation of minds caused by these fallacies. Mechanism holds that every aspect of the world can be represented as a simple hierarchical structure of entities. But, while useful in fields like mathematics and manufacturing, this idea is generally worthless, because most aspects of the world are too complex to be reduced to simple hierarchical structures. Our software-related affairs, in particular, cannot be represented in this fashion. And yet, all programming theories and development systems, and all software applications, attempt to reduce real-world problems to neat hierarchical structures of data, operations, and features. Using Karl Popper's famous principles of demarcation between science and pseudoscience, the book shows that the mechanistic ideology has turned most of our software-related activities into pseudoscientific pursuits. Using mechanism as warrant, the software elites are promoting invalid, even fraudulent, software notions. They force us to depend on generic, inferior systems, instead of allowing us to develop software skills and to create our own systems. Software mechanism emulates the methods of manufacturing, and thereby restricts us to high levels of abstraction and simple, isolated structures. The benefits of software, however, can be attained only if we start with low-level elements and learn to create complex, interacting structures. Software, the book argues, is a non-mechanistic phenomenon. So it is akin to language, not to physical objects. Like language, it permits us to mirror the world in our minds and to communicate with it. Moreover, we increasingly depend on software in everything we do, in the same way that we depend on language. Thus, being restricted to mechanistic software is like thinking and communicating while being restricted to some ready-made sentences supplied by an elite. Ultimately, by impoverishing software, our elites are achieving what the totalitarian elite described by George Orwell in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" achieves by impoverishing language: they are degrading our minds.

Computing Milieux -- Management of Computing and Information Systems.

There are fewer distinctions in any language than there are distinct things in the universe. If, therefore, languages are ways of representing the universe, a primary function of their elements must be to allow the much more varied kinds of elements out of which the universe is made to be categorized in specific ways. A prototype approach to linguistic categories is a particular way of answering the question of how this categorization operates. It involves two claims. First, that linguistic categorization exploits principles that are not specific to language but characterize most, if not all, processes of cognition. Secondly, that a basic principle by which cognitive and linguistic categories are organized is the prototype principle, which assigns elements to a category not because they exemplify properties that are absolutely required of each one of its members, but because they exhibit, in varying degrees, certain types of similarity with a particular category member which has been established as the best example (or: prototype) of its kind. The development of the prototype approach into a satisfactory body of theory obviously requires both that its empirical base be enriched, and that its conceptual foundations be clarified. These are the areas where this volume, in its 26 essays, makes original contributions. The first two parts contain discussions in which various kinds of linguistic phenomena are analysed in ways that make essential use of prototype notions. The last two parts contain discussions in which prototype notions themselves become the object, rather than the instrument, of analytical scrutiny.

Along with its companion volume (Database Dreaming Volume I), this book offers a collection of essays on the general topic of relational databases and relational database technology. Most of those essays, though not all, have been published before, but only in journals and magazines that are now hard to find or in books that are now out of print. Here’s a lightly edited excerpt from the preface (so this is the author speaking): I went back and reviewed all of those early essays, looking for ones that seemed worth reviving (or, rather, revising and reviving) at this time. Of course, some of them definitely weren’t! However, out of a total of around 130 original papers, I did find some 20 or so that seemed to me worth preserving and hadn’t already been incorporated in, or superseded by, more recent books of mine. So I tracked down the original versions of those 20 or so papers and set to work. When I was done, though, I found I had somewhere in excess of 600 pages on my hands—too much, in my view, for just one book, and so I split them across two separate volumes. Highlights of the present volume include a detailed explanation of the multiple assignment operator and why it’s so essential; an investigation into why object and database technologies are so much more different than they’re often made out to be; a critical examination of SQL’s support for pointers (“references”); a tutorial on the counterintuitive (but crucial) concept of tables with no columns; and an annotated and extended debate between the author and E. F. Codd, inventor of the relational model, on the subject of nulls and three-valued logic.

3. 1 What are formal methods? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 3. 2 A survey of formal methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 3. 2. 1 FDTs and FSLs for sequential software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 3. 2. 1. 1 VDM (Vienna Development Method). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 3. 2. 1. 2 Z. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 3. 2. 1. 3 me too . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 3. 2. 1. 4 HOS and AXES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 3. 2. 1. 5 Gist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 3. 2. 1. 6 Clear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 3. 2. 1. 7 OBJ. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 3. 2. 1. 8 ACT ONE and ACT TWO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 3. 2. 1. 9 CIP-L. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 3. 2. 1. 10 LPG. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 3. 2. 1. 11 Larch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 3. 2. 1. 12 Logic languages-the Prolog family. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 3. 2. 1. 13 Functional languages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 3. 2. 2 FDTs and FSLs for concurrent software. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 3. 2. 2. 1 LOTOS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 3. 2. 2. 2 Estelle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 3. 2. 2. 3 SDL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 3. 2. 2. 4 ASN. l . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 3. 2. 2. 5 TTCN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 3. 2. 2. 6 Gypsy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 3. 2. 3 Graphical formalisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 3. 2. 3. 1 Petri nets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 3. 2. 3. 2 Higraphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 3. 2. 4 Less formal methods and notations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 3. 2. 4. 1 SADT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 3. 2. 4. 2 Structured Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 3. 2. 4. 3 SSADM and LSDM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 3. 2. 4. 4 JSPandJSD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 3. 2. 4. 5 HDM and the SPECIAL language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 3. 2. 4. 6 Structured analysis and design of real-time systems. . 27 3. 3 Support tools for FDTs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .