Software Abstractions
Download Software Abstractions PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Software Abstractions book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Software Abstractions, revised edition
An approach to software design that introduces a fully automated analysis giving designers immediate feedback, now featuring the latest version of the Alloy language. In Software Abstractions Daniel Jackson introduces an approach to software design that draws on traditional formal methods but exploits automated tools to find flaws as early as possible. This approach—which Jackson calls “lightweight formal methods” or “agile modeling”—takes from formal specification the idea of a precise and expressive notation based on a tiny core of simple and robust concepts but replaces conventional analysis based on theorem proving with a fully automated analysis that gives designers immediate feedback. Jackson has developed Alloy, a language that captures the essence of software abstractions simply and succinctly, using a minimal toolkit of mathematical notions. This revised edition updates the text, examples, and appendixes to be fully compatible with Alloy 4.
Software Abstractions
A new approach to software verification introduces Alloy, a language that captures the essence of software abstraction with an analysis that is fully automated. In Software Abstractions Daniel Jackson introduces a new approach to software design that draws on traditional formal methods but exploits automated tools to find flaws as early as possible. This approach—which Jackson calls "lightweight formal methods" or "agile modeling"—takes from formal specification the idea of a precise and expressive notation based on a tiny core of simple and robust concepts but replaces conventional analysis based on theorem proving with a fully automated analysis that gives designers immediate feedback. Jackson has developed Alloy, a language that captures the essence of software abstractions simply and succinctly, using a minimal toolkit of mathematical notions. The designer can use automated analysis not only to correct errors but also to make models that are more precise and elegant. This approach, Jackson says, can rescue designers from "the tarpit of implementation technologies" and return them to thinking deeply about underlying concepts. Software Abstractions introduces the key elements of the approach: a logic, which provides the building blocks of the language; a language, which adds a small amount of syntax to the logic for structuring descriptions; and an analysis, a form of constraint solving that offers both simulation (generating sample states and executions) and checking (finding counterexamples to claimed properties). The book uses Alloy as a vehicle because of its simplicity and tool support, but the book's lessons are mostly language-independent, and could also be applied in the context of other modeling languages.
The Architecture of Scientific Software
Scientific applications involve very large computations that strain the resources of whatever computers are available. Such computations implement sophisticated mathematics, require deep scientific knowledge, depend on subtle interplay of different approximations, and may be subject to instabilities and sensitivity to external input. Software able to succeed in this domain invariably embeds significant domain knowledge that should be tapped for future use. Unfortunately, most existing scientific software is designed in an ad hoc way, resulting in monolithic codes understood by only a few developers. Software architecture refers to the way software is structured to promote objectives such as reusability, maintainability, extensibility, and feasibility of independent implementation. Such issues have become increasingly important in the scientific domain, as software gets larger and more complex, constructed by teams of people, and evolved over decades. In the context of scientific computation, the challenge facing mathematical software practitioners is to design, develop, and supply computational components which deliver these objectives when embedded in end-user application codes. The Architecture of Scientific Software addresses emerging methodologies and tools for the rational design of scientific software, including component integration frameworks, network-based computing, formal methods of abstraction, application programmer interface design, and the role of object-oriented languages. This book comprises the proceedings of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Conference on the Architecture of Scientific Software, which was held in Ottawa, Canada, in October 2000. It will prove invaluable reading for developers of scientific software, as well as for researchers in computational sciences and engineering.