Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!lfcs!db
From: db@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Dave Berry)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Reuse and Abstraction (was: reu
Message-ID: <4467@castle.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 4 Jun 90 13:13:55 GMT
References: <4979@stpstn.UUCP> <102100009@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <5132@stpstn.UUCP> <19948@duke.cs.duke.edu>
Reply-To: db@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Dave Berry)
Organization: Laboratory for the Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh U
Lines: 14

In article <19948@duke.cs.duke.edu> crm@romeo.cs.duke.edu (Charlie Martin) writes:
>The advantage of formal methods in real use (it seems to me, either
>philosophically or as an engineer) is that it gives us an argument to
>raise our degree of certainty so that we *can* believe that a few tests
>really do lead to near certainty that our implementation is going to
>work for any specified input.

Another advantage is that they can be quicker than testing.  Witness
the use of formal methods by INMOS in the development of the floating
point unit for the T800 transputer.

 Dave Berry, LFCS, Edinburgh Uni.      db%lfcs.ed.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk

	"ML don't stand for nothing!  ML *is* ML"  -- Spike Lee.