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1999 Technical Reports

An Object-Oriented Refinement Calculus

Richard F. Paige and Jonathan S. Ostroff

Technical Report CS-1999-07

York University

December 21, 1999

Abstract

Design-by-contract has been used in the BON/Eiffel setting as an industrial-strength technique for building reliable, reusable, and maintainable software systems. We show that it also provides a basis for carrying out the refinement of object-oriented specifications to programs on an industrial scale. We present a collection of algorithm refinement rules, in particular, novel rules for introducing feature calls which is the basis of object-oriented computing, as well as a new loop rule for a double-state loop invariant. We show how refinement of large systems can be decomposed into many small steps. And we describe how automated support for such a process can be developed.

(Revised August 2000. Further revisions pending.)

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