More sizzle than steak? Using an LLM to produce verified bug fixes (new preprint)






New article: “Do AI models help produce verified bug fixes?” (Huang Li, Ilgiz Mustafin, Marco Piccioni, Alessandro Schena, Reto Weber and Bertrand Meyer), submitted for publication, preprint available on arXiv.  Automatic Program Repair (APR) involves four steps: Locating the bug. Producing candidate corrections. Validating them (to make sure that they do correct the problem). Selecting the … Read more




New article: obituary of Niklaus Wirth






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




New preprint: Lessons from Formally Deployed Software Systems






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




New preprint: Seamless and Traceable Requirements






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




New preprint: Loop unrolling — formal definition and application to testing






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




New paper: seeding contradiction






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




New preprint: Programming Really Is Simple Mathematics






Bertrand Meyer and Reto Weber: Meaning as Programs — Programming Really Is Simple Mathematics, February 2025 preprint available here and also on arXiv. Theories of programming can be quite complicated; the presentation here is a return to essentials, defining programming and associated concepts (programming languages, programming methodology) entirely from elementary set-theoretical concepts. Unlike much of … Read more




New preprint: Software engineering as a domain to formalize






Bertrand Meyer, Software engineering as a domain to formalize, available here. This article is meant as a blog but was written as a standard text and I haven’t had the time to HTML-ize yet. So I am just providing an abstract below, and linking to the PDF which gives the details. The purpose is simple: … Read more




The French School of Programming






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




A remarkable group photo






On 13-15 September 1999 a symposium took place in St Catherine College in Oxford,  in honor of Tony Hoare’s “retirement” from Oxford (the word is in quotes because he has had several further productive careers since). The organizers were Jim Woodcock, Bill Roscoe and Jim Davies. The proceedings are available as Millenial Perspectives in Computer … Read more