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.




Ado About The Resource That Was (Not)






The resources we have at our disposal on a computing system may be huge, but they are always finite, and our programs’ appetite for resources will eventually exhaust them. At that stage, we have to deal with the SBYBAW rule, which sounds like a tautology but is an encouragement to look for clever algorithms: techniques for freeing resources when no resources remain may not request new resources.







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







Agile methods: the good, the bad and the ugly






Agile methods are wonderful. They’ll give you software in no time at all, turn your customers and users into friends, catch bugs before they catch you, change the world, and boost your love life.







Assessing concurrency models






In a recent experiment with students we wanted to know how the SCOOP concurrency model compares to Java Threads in terms of ease of learning, program readability and correctness. Our group, however, is heavily involved with SCOOP. How did we address the risk of bias, and other parts of the “Professor Smith Syndrome”? What are our results, and can you believe them?