Refinement Calculus

Download or read book Refinement Calculus written by Ralph-Johan Back and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much current research in computer science is concerned with two questions: is a program correct? And how can we improve a correct program preserving correctness? This latter question is known as the refinement of programs and the purpose of this book is to consider these questions in a formal setting. In fact, correctness turns out to be a special case of refinement and so the focus is on refinement. Although a reasonable background knowledge is assumed from mathematics and CS, the book is a self-contained introduction suitable for graduate students and researchers coming to this subject for the first time. There are numerous exercises provided of varying degrees of challenge.