[comp.specification] Your suggestions are needed in teaching Formal Spec

mariam@unocss.unomaha.edu (mariam) (09/01/90)

I need your assistance/recommendation/suggestions:

I will be teaching a course in formal
specification of sfw. (It is actually a second
course in sfw engineering, so its prerequisite
is an introductory course in sfw engineering.)
I am looking for a good textbook.

The following books are a little too advanced 
for the kind of students we have (otherwise,
their approaches are excellent):

    Bj0rner & Jones: Formal Spec & Software Development
    Cohen, et al: The Specification of Complex Systems

I am considering the following:

    Berzin & Luqi: Sfw Engineering with Abstraction

but that's basically a sfw engineering textbook.

Any suggestions as to what other books I should consider?
(I also considered David Gries' book: The Science of
Programming- but as its name implies, its basically about
developing programs, ivariants, etc.)

Thanks in advance...
mariam@unocss.unomaha.edu

cliff@cs.man.ac.uk (Cliff Jones) (09/03/90)

In article <3076@unocss.unomaha.edu> mariam@unocss.unomaha.edu (mariam) writes:
>
>The following books are a little too advanced 
>for the kind of students we have (otherwise,
>their approaches are excellent):
>
>    Bj0rner & Jones: Formal Spec & Software Development
>    Cohen, et al: The Specification of Complex Systems
>
I understand that our book is now anyway Out of Print.
You might consider:

	
@book{Jones90a,
	author	    =	"C. B. Jones",
	title	    =	"Systematic Software Development using VDM",
	edition =	{Second},
	publisher   =	"Prentice Hall International",
	year	    =	"1990"
}
 This tries to cover VDM at a more "programmer" level than our joint
 book which focussed of the formal specifocation of Programming
 lAnguages.

cliff jones

cliff@cs.man.ac.uk (Cliff Jones) (09/09/90)

In article <3076@unocss.unomaha.edu> mariam@unocss.unomaha.edu (mariam) writes:
>
>I need your assistance/recommendation/suggestions:
>
>I will be teaching a course in formal
>specification of sfw. ...

You should take a look at the new book by Latham et al.:

The Programming Process - an Introduction using VDM and Pascal

  J Latham, Vicky Bush and Ian D Cottam

PUBLISHED BY:	Addison Wesley
		1990
		16.95 pounds sterling (pb)
		ISBN 0-201-41661-1


cliff jones