The Way of Z Practical Programming with Formal Methods

This self-contained tutorial on Z presents realistic case studies emphasizing safety-critical systems, with examples drawn from embedded controls, real-time and concurrent programming, computer graphics, games, text processing, databases, artificial intelligence, and object-oriented programming. It motivates the use of formal methods and discusses practical issues concerning how to apply them in real projects. It also teaches how to apply formal program derivation and verification to implement Z specifications in real programming languages with examples in C. The book includes exercises with solutions, reference materials, and a guide to further reading.

This 1997 book is a self-contained tutorial on Z, a formal notation for modelling, specifying and designing computer systems and software, for experienced professionals and serious students in programming and software engineering. It presents realistic case studies emphasising safety-critical systems, with examples drawn from embedded controls, real-time and concurrent programming, computer graphics, games, text processing, databases, artificial intelligence, and object-oriented programming. It motivates the use of formal methods and discusses practical issues concerning how to apply them in real projects. It also teaches how to apply formal program derivation and verification to implement Z specifications in real programming languages with examples in C. The book includes exercises with solutions, reference materials, and a guide to further reading.

Part I. Why Z?: 1. Formal methods; 2. Why use formal methods?; 3. Formal methods and project management; Part II. Introducing Z: 4. What is Z?; 5. A first example in Z; 6. From prose to Z: control console; 7. Introducing schemas: text editor; Part III. Elements of Z: 8. Elements; 9. Structure; 10. Logic; 11. Synthesis; 12. Schemas and schema calculus; 13. Schema types and bindings; 14. Generic definitions and free types; 15. Formal reasoning; Part IV. Studies in Z: 16. Document control system; 17. Text processing; 18. Eight queens; 19. Computer graphics and computational geometry; 20. Rule-based programming; 21. Graphical user interface; 22. Safety-critical protection system; 23. Modelling large systems; 24. Concurrency and real time; 25. Object-oriented programming; Part V. From Z to Code: 26. Program derivation and formal verification; 27. From Z to code.

This 1997 book is a self-contained tutorial on Z for experienced programming professionals, discussing practical ways to apply formal methods in real projects and showing how to implement them in the C programming language, through case studies in safety-critical systems and other examples from computer graphics, word processing, databases, and object-oriented programming.