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Re: [stellation-res] Sorry for the
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On Wednesday, August 27, 2003, at 05:34 PM, Jonathan Gossage wrote:
(By the way, are there any Z fans out there for specifications?)
What is Z, a formal specification language?
Yes. It's a formal specification language for software systems, based
on set
theory. I spec'ed an early version of Stellation (it was called Coven
in those days)
in Z, and it really helped me to clarify my understanding of how things
needed to
work. (Actually, I did an experiment where I tried speccing in Z and
UML/OCL
concurrently, in order to compare them. The results were, for
understanding things on an abstract level, UML was utterly worthless.
For specification, UML/OCL were worthless.
For understanding a particular implementation, UML/OCL could have
significant
explanatory value, but its semantics were imprecise. Z, on the other
hand, was
incredibly useful as a tool for learning and understanding, and for
specifying behavior.)
-Mark
Mark Craig Chu-Carroll, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM Research
*** http://stellation.eclipse.org
*** Work: mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/Home: markcc@xxxxxxx
