Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
For a while now I have been engaged in a core problem of software verification: the aliasing problem. As with many difficult problems in science, it is easy to state the basic question: can we determine automatically whether at a program point p the values of two reference expressions e and f can ever denote … Read more
A new version of my Touch of Class [1] programming textbook is available. It is not quite a new edition but more than just a new printing. All the typos that had been reported as of a few months ago have been corrected. The format is also significantly smaller. This change is more than a … Read more
I have mentioned this paper before but as a draft. It has now been accepted by ACM’s Computing Surveys and is scheduled to appear in September 2014; the current text, revised from the previous version, is available [1]. Here is the abstract: Software verification has emerged as a key concern for ensuring the continued … Read more
Software verification is progressing slowly but surely. Much of that progress is incremental: making the fundamental results applicable to real programs as they are built every day by programmers working in standard circumstances. A key condition is to minimize the amount of annotations that they have to provide. The article mentioned in my previous post, … Read more
The following presentations from our ETH group in the ICSE week (International Conference on Software Engineering, San Francisco) address important issues of software specification and verification, describing new techniques that we have recently developed as part of our work building EVE, the Eiffel Verification Environment. One is at ICSE proper and the other at … Read more
As part of a Festschrift volume for Martin Glinz of the university of Zurich I wrote a paper [1] describing a general approach to requirements that I have been practicing and developing for a while, and presented in a couple of talks. The basic idea is to rely on object-oriented techniques, including contracts for … Read more
In modeling object-oriented programs, for purposes of verification (proofs) or merely for a better understanding, we are faced with the unique “general relativity” property of OO programming: all the operations you write (excluding non-OO mechanisms such as static functions) are expressed relative to a “current object” which changes repeatedly during execution. More precisely at the … Read more
A couple of weeks ago I proposed a small quiz. (I also stated that the answer would come “on Wednesday” — please understand any such promise as “whenever I find the time”. Sorry.) Here is the answer. The quiz was: I have a function: For 0 it yields 0. For 1 it yields 1. For … Read more
Alexander Kogtenkov pointed out to me that precursor work to my papers on the Alias Calculus [1] [2] had been published by John Whaley and Martin Rinard [3]. There are some significant differences; in particular my rules are simpler, and their work is not explicitly presented as a calculus. But many of the basic ideas … Read more
Both Gary Leavens and Jim Horning commented (partly here, partly on Facebook) about my Domain Theory article [1] to mention that Larch had mechanisms for domain modeling and specification reuse. As Horning writes: The Larch Shared Language was really all about creating reusable domain theories, including theorems about the domains. See, for example [2] and … Read more