A practical assessment of formal specification approaches for data abstractions

Abstract Formal methods capable of precisely describing the properties and the externally provided functionality of abstract data types (ADTs) continue to be a major area of theoretical and practical research, mainly in the preimplementation phases of the software life cycle. We describe an assessment of these methods and discuss various issues related to every method and several extensions developed to tackle the inherent limitations of the methods in various scopes. The methods are presented along with application examples and are compared and contrasted using a set of criteria including comprehensibility, minimality, ease of construction, and executability.

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