An Introduction to the Construction and Verification of Alphard Programs

Wulf, Wm. A.; London, Ralph L.; Shaw, Mary

doi:10.1109/tse.1976.233830

Cited by 258 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Alphard [93] described support for specifications that indicated the invariants and preconditions and postconditions of each class (called a "form") that were intended to support verification. Even early versions of the currently popular specification languages Z [1,83] and VDM [10,41] included support for preconditions and postconditions and continue to do so.…”

Section: Specification and Documentation With Assertionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As noted above, experimental programming languages that emphasized verification adopted this approach in the 1970s, including Gypsy [4], Euclid [72], and Alphard [93]. 2 The Turing Language [37], developed in the 80's, combined the interactive aspects of Basic with the simplicity of Pascal and the flexibility of C, but, consistent with its goal of supporting beginning programmers, also included assertion constructs.…”

Section: Assertions In Programming Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A historical perspective on runtime assertion checking in software development

Clarke

Rosenblum

2006

SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes

114

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This report presents initial results in the area of software testing and analysis produced as part of the Software Engineering Impact Project. The report describes the historical development of runtime assertion checking, including a description of the origins of and significant features associated with assertion checking mechanisms, and initial findings about current industrial use. A future report will provide a more comprehensive assessment of development practice, for which we invite readers of this report to contribute information. IntroductionThe Software Engineering Impact Project is documenting the impact that software engineering research has had on computer science research and on software development practice. The authors of this paper are responsible for documenting the impact of research in software testing and analysis for the Impact Project. One aspect of testing and analysis that has clearly had an impact is the widespread use of assertions, particularly for use in automated runtime detection of faults. This report documents the results of our initial assessment of assertions and narrates the history of software engineering research as it relates to the evolution and maturation of runtime assertion checking capabilities in programming languages and software development support tools.Despite decades of research into powerful software engineering technologies, and despite the continual discovery of tenets of good software engineering practice, software development remains an exceedingly complex endeavor. No matter how thoroughly a software system's requirements are documented, and no matter how carefully and elegantly the system's design has been constructed, inevitably latent faults, or incorrect program statements, are introduced in the system's implementation. These faults may be revealed during various levels of testing, or they may make a more inopportune appearance during field use by endusers. In such situations the faults are typically manifested externally as program failures, such as unexpected outputs, or other undesirable outcomes such as a program crash. Such failures provide developers with precious little information for initiating the task of correlating the simple external evidence of failure with the complexity of searching numerous possible locations for the faults that caused them.Assertions are one of the most useful automated techniques available for detecting faults and providing information about their locations, even for faults that are traversed during execution but do not lead to failures.As described in this report, assertions have a long and distinguished history in the annals of software engineering and programming language design. Initially developed as a means of stating expected or desired program properties as a necessary step in constructing formal, deductive proofs of program correctness, assertions have found many other applications in software engineering over the years, albeit primarily in the later stages of development (particularly in the developmen...

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Section: Specification and Documentation With Assertionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Assertions In Programming Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A historical perspective on runtime assertion checking in software development

Clarke

Rosenblum

2006

SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes

114

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“…One concept that had an impact on the design of languages was the idea of an explicit interface, and providing rights to the creator of objects and the users of objects. The encapsulation mechanisms of Simula 67 were refined in the 1970s by the developers of CLU [Liskov and Zilles 1975;Liskov et al 1977] and Alphard [Wulf et al 1976;Shaw 1981]. CLU and Alphard both provided a data abstraction construct that enforced protection of the data entities, allowing access only to the operations defined for them.…”

Section: Abstractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of software engineering research on modern programming languages

Ryder

Soffa

Burnett

2005

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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Software engineering research and programming language design have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, with traceable impacts since the 1970s, when these areas were first distinguished from one another. This report documents this relationship by focusing on several major features of current programming languages: data and procedural abstraction, types, concurrency, exceptions, and visual programming mechanisms. The influences are determined by tracing references in publications in both fields, obtaining oral histories from language designers delineating influences on them, and tracking cotemporal research trends and ideas as demonstrated by workshop topics, special issue publications, and invited talks in the two fields. In some cases there is conclusive This article has been developed under the auspices of the Impact Project. The aim of the project is to provide a scholarly study of the impact that software engineering research-both academic and industrial-has had upon practice. The principal output of the project is a series of individual papers covering the impact upon practice of research in several selected major areas of software engineering. Each of these papers is being published in ACM TOSEM. Additional information about the project can be found at http://www.acm.org/sigsoft/impact/. This article is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under award number CCF-0137766, the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (ACM SIGSOFT), the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), and the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Association (JEITA). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations, expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect, of the NSF, ACM SIGSOFT, the IEE, or JEITA. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036 USA, fax: +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. data supporting influence. In other cases, there are circumstantial arguments (i.e., cotemporal ideas) that indicate influence. Using this approach, this study provides evidence of the impact of software engineering research on modern programming language design and documents the close relationship between these two fields.

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“…Among the better known languages from this era are CLU [2], Alphard [3], Simula [4], Mesa [51, Euclid [6] and Ada [7]. Of these languages, Ada is certain to become the most widely used.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two implementation models of abstract data types

Gannon

Zelkowitz

1987

Computer Languages

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A~--This paper compares two implementation models for abstract data types: direct and indirect implementations. Direct implementations offer relatively cheap execution and expensive compilation costs while indirect implementations result in relatively expensive implementations and cheap compilation costs. These two models are both accommodated by Ada, and a small experiment compares their costs for a particular data type.

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An Introduction to the Construction and Verification of Alphard Programs

Cited by 258 publications

References 24 publications

A historical perspective on runtime assertion checking in software development

A historical perspective on runtime assertion checking in software development

The impact of software engineering research on modern programming languages

Two implementation models of abstract data types

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