Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Bertrand Meyer The ETH Chair of Software Engineering has won a grant from the Hasler foundation, in a joint project with the Technical University of Lucerne and the Autonomous Systems Lab of ETH, to develop a robotics framework involving concurrent computation. The project, called Roboscoop, will produce a demonstrator system: a “SmartWalker” robot — a robotic version … Read more
Reading about the latest hullabaloo around Android’s usage of Java, and more generally following the incessant flow of news about X suing Y in the software industry (with many combinations of X and Y) over Java and other object-oriented technologies, someone with an Eiffel perspective can only smile. Throughout its history, suggestions to use Eiffel … Read more
To verify software, we must specify it; otherwise there is nothing to verify against. People often cite the burden of specification as the major obstacle toward making verification practical. At issue are not only the effort required to express the goals of software elements (their contracts) but also intermediate assertions, or “verification conditions”, including loop … Read more
I posted here a draft of a new article, Towards a Calculus of Object Programs. Here is the abstract: Verifying properties of object-oriented software requires a method for handling references in a simple and intuitive way, closely related to how O-O programmers reason about their programs. The method presented here, a Calculus of Object Programs, … Read more