New LASER proceedings






Springer has just published in the tutorial sub-series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science a new proceedings volume for the LASER summer school [1]. The five chapters are notes from the 2008, 2009 and 2010 schools (a previous volume [2] covered earlier schools). The themes range over search-based software engineering (Mark Harman and colleagues), replication … Read more




TOOLS 2012, “The Triumph of Objects”, Prague in May: Call for Workshops






The TOOLS federated conferences, held in Prague May 28 to June 1, will include five conferences (TOOLS EUROPE, ICMT, Software Composition, Tests And Proofs, Multicore Software Engineering) and a number of workshop. It is still possible to propose workshops; the instructions are given here.







If I’m not pure, at least my functions are






It is often suggested that the programming language should support specifying that a routine is pure; many people have indeed proposed the addition of a keyword such as pure to Eiffel. One of the reasons this is not — in my opinion — such a great idea is that purity is just a special case of the more general problem of framing: specifying and verifying what a routine does not change. If we can specify an arbitrary frame property, then we can, as a special case covered by the general mechanism, specify that a routine changes nothing. The language solution is simple: no routine may change the value of a query other than those specified in its postcondition







In praise of Knuth and Liskov






Youth has its advantages; perhaps the most striking is that we can, in our own lifetime, meet in person some of the very founders of our discipline. No living physicist has seen Newton; no chemist has heard Lavoisier. For us, it works. Today, Ladies and Gentlemen, we have the honor of introducing two of the undisputed pioneers of informatics.







A couple of loop examples






(This entry originated as a post on the EiffelStudio user group mailing list.)  Here are a couple of actual examples of the new loop variants discussed in the blog entry immediately preceding this one. They came out of my current work; I started updating a program to take advantage of the new facility. As a typical example, … Read more