Talk:VDM specification language
I've been writing significant tracts of this article based on my university lecture notes. I find this subject fairly dull, but it is certainly worthwhile. That said, despite being in a substantially different (and, I think, better) style from the original source, this page still sucks. Please help re-write it!:
- More accessible language
- Tidier formula typesetting
- Better/cleaner examples
Whitepaw 14:35, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
Just a note, "_(curvearrow)_" is a description of the symbol, not the actual symbol. It's a curved arrow going clockwise from about 10 O'clock to 2 O'clock — Whitepaw 14:52, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
A great job has been done so far in providing a comprehensive introduction to VDM. Nonetheless, I agree with Whitepaw that the article is quite dull. There's interesting current work on tools development and indistrial application in VDM, and some of it is significant enough to merit inclusion in the articles, potentially making them more interesting and relevant to a wider readership.
I agree strongly with the suggestion that this article should be merged with the Vienna Development Method. I'd like then to revise the merged article so that it uses the ASCII versions of the notation permitted by the ISO Standard and now used in the current textbooks and, importantly, the tools. In my experience, this also serves to make the notation more accessible to the general computer science reader and provides for tidier typesetting.
--JohnSFitzgerald 19:25, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
I've started the process by moving the article over to the interchange (ASCII) syntax. Large parts of the original article have been retained for the moment, although I've reorganised the language description to focus on the major semantic features rather than the details of language syntax.
Overall, this article is too long and more or less just covers material that is better presented in the existing texts. The next revision step shoud be a completion of the material on modelling functionality and then a cutting down of the language description to discussion of the most interesting features of the language (invariants, implicit specification, handling of partial functions, executable subset, proof obligations) and the relationship to Z and B. It shoudl then be possible to make a senisble merge with an updated version of the VDM article.