Abstract
Many Z users have found that the language Z and the conventions for its usage do not provide a powerful enough notation for structuring large specifications. They have found that they often cannot construct ‘high level’ specifications from existing ‘lower level’ ones, or can only do so by means of some tortuous usage of the language. There have been several attempts to improve this situation by extending the Z language, and the conventions for its usage, to include some high level structuring mechanism. Several groups have independently devised mechanisms for producing object oriented specifications in Z. This paper describes an approach to object oriented specification developed with the aim of providing additional structure to aid in the process of refinement. However we believe the approach to be more widely applicable, and that it can be used to aid in the structuring of general specifications. The paper will describe the basic approach adopted for specifying objects, the problems experienced in expressing them in Z, and outline the framework in which we utilise the individual object specifications.
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© 1991 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Whysall, P.J., McDermid, J.A. (1991). An Approach to Object Oriented Specification using Z. In: Nicholls, J.E. (eds) Z User Workshop, Oxford 1990. Workshops in Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3540-1_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3540-1_13
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-19672-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-3540-1
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