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Specifying the apple Macintosh™ Toolbox event manager

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Formal Aspects of Computing

Abstract

The Macintosh™ Toolbox is a collection of resources, stored in ROM, of use to software developers building user interface components. This paper documents an attempt to specify one part of the Toolbox: namely the data types and routines for event-handling. The chief objective of the paper is to illustrate an approach to building a formal specification in which, starting from simple structures, the final specification is arrived at by a process of successive modifications, generalisations, instantiations and translations. The paper also constitutes an example of the Larch algebraic style, as well as the two-tiered approach characteristic of the Larch family of specification languages.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary College, University of London, 327 Mile End Road, E1 4NS, London, UK

    C. T. Burton, S. J. Cook, S. Gikas, J. R. Rowson & S. T. Sommerville

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  1. C. T. Burton
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  2. S. J. Cook
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  3. S. Gikas
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  4. J. R. Rowson
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  5. S. T. Sommerville
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Additional information

This work has been undertaken as part of the Alvey HI 059 project “Formal Aspects of Interactive Dialogues”, supported under SERC Grant No. GR/D/1646.8.

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Burton, C.T., Cook, S.J., Gikas, S. et al. Specifying the apple Macintosh™ Toolbox event manager. Formal Aspects of Computing 1, 147–171 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01887203

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01887203

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