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Lookup NU author(s): Emeritus Professor Cliff JonesORCiD
This paper traces the important steps in the history --up to around 1990--of research on reasoning about programs. The main focus is on sequential imperative programs but some comments are made on concurrency. Initially, researchers focussed on ways of verifying that a program satisfies its specification (or that two programs were equivalent). Over time it became clear that {\em post facto} verification is only practical for small programs and attention turned to verification methods which support the development of programs; for larger programs it is necessary to exploit a notation of compositionality. Coping with concurrent algorithms is much more challenging -- this and other extensions are considered briefly. The main thesis of this paper is that the idea of reasoning about programs has been around since they were first written; the search has been to find tractable methods.
Author(s): Jones CB
Publication type: Report
Publication status: Published
Series Title: Department of Computing Science Technical Report Series
Year: 2001
Pages: 49
Print publication date: 01/07/2001
Source Publication Date: July 2001
Report Number: 740
Institution: Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne
URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/740.pdf
