Abstract
The RAISE specification language was developed for industrial use on the basis of experience in applying VDM and other approaches to software development. This experience suggested the need to have, in one common framework, some specification concepts besides those of VDM, together with methods and tools to make them easier to use.
The language meets this need by unifying the model oriented and property oriented specification techniques for both applicative and imperative systems. It also provides a unified approach to the development of applicative and imperative systems, based on a proof theoretic view of refinement. All this affects how the semantic foundations and proof theory for the language are formalised.
In this paper, some language design decisions are motivated and the associated effects on the formal basis of the language are discussed. Particular attention is paid to how semantic difficulties are resolved. The design decisions are placed in a wider context by looking at other ways of unifying specification techniques, some of which have been adopted in other projects. Some conclusions are drawn about the completed formal work and the outstanding tasks.
This work was partly supported by STC Technology Limited (the predecessor of BNR Europe Limited) and the Commission of the European Communities (CEC) under the ESPRIT programme for software technology, project number 315, “Rigorous Approach to Industrial Software Engineering (RAISE)”.
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Milne, R. (1994). The formal basis for the RAISE specification language. In: Andrews, D.J., Groote, J.F., Middelburg, C.A. (eds) Semantics of Specification Languages (SoSL). Workshops in Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3229-5_3
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