Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
A Google search for something entirely unrelated led me to a very old issue of the Daily Nexus, the student newspaper of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I was teaching back then. Apparently (I had forgotten all about it of course) I was piqued by a student’s letter to the editor, where he … Read more
Bertrand Meyer: Obituary for Niklaus Wirth, in Formal Aspects of Computing, volume 37, issue 2, pages 1-11, published 3 March 2025, available here (publisher’s site). Shortly after Niklaus Wirth — Turing Award winner for his many seminal contributions including Pascal, Algol W, Modula, virtual machines, Lilith/Ceres, railway diagrams, PL/360, seminal textbooks… — passed away last … Read more
Li Huang, Sophie Ebersold, Alexander Kogtenkov, Bertrand Meyer and Yinling Liu, Lessons from Formally Verified Deployed Software Systems, submitted for publication (since March 2023), preprint available here for the full version (with detailed review of all 32 projects) and here for a shorter one (with same core content but only 11 detailed reviews, the others … Read more
Maria Naumcheva, Sophie Ebersold, Jean-Michel Bruel and Bertrand Meyer, UOOR: Seamless and Traceable Requirements, submitted for publication, February 2025, preprint available on arXiv. This article grew out of Maria Naumcheva’s PhD thesis defended on December 18 at the University of Toulouse (I will write separately about the thesis as a whole). It is part of … Read more
Li Huang, Bertrand Meyer and Reto Weber, New preprint: Loop unrolling: formal definition and application to testing, February 2025, submitted to publication. Available here on arXiv and also here. Abstract Testing coverage criteria usually make a gross simplification: they assume that loops will have their bodies executed 0 or 1 time. How much (specificall,y how … Read more
Preprint of new article: Victoria Kananchuk, Ilgiz Mustafin and Bertrand Meyer, Bugfix: a standard language, database schema and repository for research on bugs and automatic program repair, submitted for publication, February 2025. Available on arXiv here. Also available here. What this is in a nutshell (there is a longer abstract below): a proposal for, and … Read more
Just published: Li Huang, Bertrand Meyer and Manuel Oriol, Seeding Contradiction: a fast method for generating full-coverage test suites, in Springer Nature Computer Science, vol. 6, no. 4, 2025. The text is available here on the publisher’s site. Also available is a preprint version. This just published SNCS article and revised and extended from a … Read more
Reading notes. From: Quelques éléments d’histoire des nombres négatifs (Elements of a history of negative numbers) by Anne Boyé, Proyecto Pénélope, 2002, revision available here; On Solving Equations, Negative Numbers, and Other Absurdities: Part II by Ralph Raimi, available here; Note sur l’histoire des nombres entiers négatifs (Note on the History of Negative Numbers) by … Read more
Recently I prepared some of my books for free access on the Web (after gaining agreement from the publishers). Here are the corresponding links. They actually point to pages that present the respective books and have further links to the actual PDF versions. Although the texts are essentially those of the books as published, I … Read more
July 14 (still here for 15 minutes) is not a bad opportunity to announced the publication of a new book: The French School of Programming. The book is a collection of chapters, thirteen of them, by rock stars of programming and software engineering research (plus me), preceded by a Foreword by Jim Woodcock and a … Read more