Abstract
This paper offers a review of Giuseppe Primero’s (2020) book “On the foundations of computing”. Mathematical, engineering, and experimental foundations of the science of computing are examined under the light of the notions of formal, physical, and experimental computational validity provided by the author. It is challenged the thesis that experimental computational validity can be defined only for the algorithmic method and not for the software development process. The notions of computational hypothesis and computational experiment provided by Primiero (2020) are extended to the case of software development. Finally, it is highlighted how the hypothetical-deductive method is involved in the practice of using models to corroborate computational hypotheses in software testing. As a concluding remark, it is underlined how defining experimental computational validity in the context of software development offers a sound experimental foundation to the science of computing.
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Notes
See Mosses (2006) for an introduction on denotational semantics.
Gordon Moore in 1965 realised that the cost of circuit components decreases as the number of components per circuit increases and predicted that the number of transistors in a chip would have doubled every two years (Moore et al. 1965).
Current software can reach hundreds of millions of code lines or even more, as it is the case for the Google web services with its 2 billion lines.
Some of these relations, namely verification and validation, are considered in Sect. 6 below.
That high-level language programs can be understood as computational artefacts is a well-accepted statement since (Turner 2014).
Whereas a specification, often called property specification, requires a definite behavioural property to be satisfied by a program, a system specification expresses all the behaviours that the program is expected to implement.
Notice that no mathematical model is here referred to and so this relation only involves the computational one.
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Angius, N. On the Experimental Foundation of Computing. Axiomathes 32 (Suppl 3), 1221–1236 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-022-09645-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-022-09645-z