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Article View: comp.specification
Article #235

Re: Difference between Spec and Code

#235
From: Don Cohen
Date: Fri, 09 Nov 1990 23:39
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I've always thought that a specification is a statement of intent,
i.e., it says whatever the specifier considers important.  Ideally
it should say everything that the specifier wants to say, nothing
more, and should be easy to understand.  Most often, the IO behavior
of a program is what people are interested in, but often it is
important to specify such things as timing constraints.  It is
also conceivable that it might be important to me that the program
to do some task be written in Fortran, or that it not use the SQRT
function, etc.  I don't know any formal languages that are good at
all such kinds of specifications, although there are some that are
good at describing IO behavior without describing much else.

We all know what code is, on the other hand.  Clearly the "satisfies"
relationship between spec and code is many to many.  It is impossible
to guess from an implementation which specification it was meant to
satisfy.  Your attempt to "optimize" an implementation might make it
no longer "work" if, say, the purpose of that "useless" loop you
removed was to provide a delay.
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From: donc@vaxa.isi.edu (Don Cohen)
Newsgroups: comp.specification
Subject: Re: Difference between Spec and Code
Summary: one man's spec is another man's implementation
Message-ID: <15605@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 9 Nov 90 23:39:06 GMT
Sender: news@isi.edu
Reply-To: donc@venera.isi.edu (Don Cohen)
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
Lines: 18