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Discusses the importance of formal specifications and surveys a number of promising specification techniques. The role of formal specifications both in proofs of program correctness and in programming methodologies leading to programs which are correct by construction, is explained. Some criteria are established for evaluating the practical potential of specification techniques. The importance of providing specifications at the right level of abstraction is discussed, and a particularly interesting class of specification techniques, those used to construct specifications of data abstractions, is identified. A number of specification techniques for describing data abstractions are surveyed and evaluated with respect to the criteria.
Liskov et al. (1975) studied this question.