Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!sean
From: sean@castle.ed.ac.uk (S Matthews)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: call for discussion: comp.lang.specification
Message-ID: <798@castle.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 24 Oct 89 10:36:16 GMT
References: <3614@midway.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Reply-To: sean@castle.ed.ac.uk (S Matthews)
Organization: Edinburgh University Computing Service
Lines: 24

In article <3614@midway.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> Jack Campin <jack@cs.glasgow.ac.uk> writes:
>
>
>What do people think of having a newsgroup to discuss specification and
>requirements languages - Z, Larch, OBJ, Lotos, VDM, metoo, CSP, CCS, Petri
>nets, RML, Forest, hardware description languages,... and related issues?
>A thought prompted by wanting to ask a question about them and realizing it
>didn't fit into any newsgroup I could think of.
>

Considering that the UK Ministry of Defence has started a program to
make sure that al safety critical software is formally verified, this is
an idea whose time has come.

comp.lang.formal would be fine; after all if we want a newsgroup to
discuss say Z then we can always form comp.lang.Z as well (though
considering the amount of stuff on the Z mailing list recently this is
not an immediate danger (if any of you are reading this---consider this 
deliberately provocative).

There are several mailing lists already going about some of these, so
would it not be a good idea to let them know what is suggested?

Sean