Reading A (due Mon Feb 7)
PDFs of the readings can be downloaded from a private website to which students have access. Please note the submission instructions.
- Jonathan
Jacky. The Way of Z: Practical Programming with Formal
Methods. Cambridge
University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-521-55976-6 (pbk), ISBN
0-521-55041-6 (hbk).
Website: http://staff.washington.edu/~jon/z-book/ - Susan Lammers. Programmers at work : interviews with 19 programmers who shaped the computer industry. Chapter: Butler Lampson. Redmond, WA: Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1989. ISBN: 1556152116
- C. A. Hoare. The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture. Delivered at ACM '80, Nashville, Tennessee, October 27, 1980.
- Anthony Hall and Roderick Chapman. Correctness By Construction: Developing a Commercial Secure System. IEEE Software. Jan-Feb 2002.
- M. Jackson, "Brilliance", from Software Requirements And Specifications, Addison-Wesley Addison Wesley Professional, 1995.
Study Questions A
Be concise, clear, and thoughtful; for most questions, a sentence of two should suffice. There is more than one right answer and more than one wrong answer.
- What does Jacky say is the only role for testing? Do you agree?
- How does Lampson describe a "beautiful program"? Does this sound right to you?
- What feature of Algol 60 excited Hoare and why? For Hoare, what is the higher goal of programming language design? Which of his comments look dated and which have stood the test of time? Give one example of each.
- Is Hall's analogy between software and cars appropriate? Does Hall think that construction-by-correctness can eliminate all defects?
- It is quite possible that Fred's project was fundamentally complex and Jane's was not. As a manager, how would you evaluate the quality of their work?