🚀 go-pugleaf

jon@cs.washington.edu (Jon Jacky) writes:
: 
: >2) How long has it taken you to comfortably spec in Z?
: 
: I've been experimenting with Z for over three years.  The specs I've written
: in the last ten months or so haven't been half bad.  Before that, most of them
: were awful, I now realize.   
: 
: The right question to ask isn't "how comfortable is it to write specs," but 
: "how comfortable is it to *read* them"!   Good specs are hard to write but easy
: to read, bad specs are easy to write but just about impossible to understand.
: So, you can learn to read and understand Z quickly, but writing it well takes
: much longer.
: 
: I think most people have found that it is quite difficult to write 
: Z expressively and well, in applications other than the small databases that 
: tend to dominate the tutorial materials.  Partly this is just the inherent
: difficulty of expressing exactly what you want, no more and no less, instead
: of just plunging on and building something that does sort of what you had in 
: mind, more or less.  Partly it's because years of programming tends to warp
: your mind in a particular direction that makes it especially difficult to
: grasp what should be going on in notations such as Z.

I tried to specify -- in Z -- some of the internals of a large program
that I am currently writing before I started.  But I found it difficult;
is seemed bulky and not very informative.  I ended up suggesting the
data structures using C++ classes and fell gradually down the slippery
slope from specification to implementation.  Not a disaster, because
ultimately I needed the implementation, anyway.

Presumably I am still in the phase that you were in in the initial
two years and two months.

It might help me to see some of your specifications -- the ones that
you consider well-written.  I presume that they were written for real
problems, and not just fot tutorial-sized data bases.

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------
Try one or more of the following addresses to reply.
at work:	hendrik@vedge.com,  iros1!vedge!hendrik
at home:	uunet!ozrout!topoi!hendrik