Objectives

This section discusses the problems involved in establishing global invariants and presents some formalisms for specifying the behavior of collections of objects. \nop{ It also includes a brief introduction to model-based specification. }

Points to emphasize

Hints

Formal methods for object-oriented programming will increasingly become important. In particular, a number of development methods already include a model-based specification language \`{a} la Z or VDM for specifying the functional properties of objects. See also section zed.

Questions

    .so q5

Comments

This section is intended as a starting point for studying formal approaches to the specification of object-oriented software.