From informal requirements to a running program: A case study in algebraic specification and transformational programming

AbstractAlgebraic specification and transformational programming have been advocated as new approaches to the development of software, in order to solve some of the technical problems in software engineering such as “early validation”, correctness of implementations, re-usability of software, or re-usability of software design. By means of a nontrivial example, viz an interactive text editor, we demonstrate that the combined use of these approaches allows to bridge the gap between verbally stated requirements and a running program, even for non-toy, realistic problems