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Re: Info on Spec Languages

John,

I remember Mesa very well.  I was a member of the Computer Science
Laboratory at PARC from 1977-84.  (Better than Ada, in my opinion, because
it's smaller.)

If you have access to the World-Wide Web, your best starting point is the
Larch Home Page, URL

    http://larch-www.lcs.mit.edu:8001/larch/

If not, drop everything and work on getting WWW access!  :-)

Seriously, you can do an anonymous FTP to larch.lcs.mit.edu and look in the
directory pub/Larch to get you off the ground.  There is a lengthy README,
and the files and subdirectories will get you off to a pretty good start.

I assume that you have already read "The Book" and "The Proceedings"?

@book{GHGJMW93,
	title = 	"Larch: Languages and Tools for Formal Specification",
	author = 	"John V. Guttag and James J. Horning,
                         with S.J. Garland, K.D. Jones, A. Modet,
                         and J. M. Wing",
	year = 		1993,
	publisher = 	"Springer-Verlag",
	series = 	"Texts and Monographs in Computer Science",
	note = 		"{ISBN 0-387-94006-5/ISBN 3-540-94006-5}"
}
@book{MW92,
	title = 	"First International Workshop on Larch, Dedham 1992",
	author = 	"Ursula Martin and Jeannette M. Wing (Eds.)",
	year = 		1993,
	publisher = 	"Springer-Verlag",
	series = 	"Workshops in Computing",
	note = 		"{ISBN 3-540-19804-0/ISBN 0-387-19804-0}"
}

At present, the most-used tool is probably Dave Evans' LCLint, which is a
lint-like tool for ANSI C that does progressively more checking as
progressively more specification information is provided.

If you are specifically interested in C++ (as opposed to C), you should
contact Gary Leavens <leavens@cs.iastate.edu>.

Jim H.


gatekeeper 1> ftp larch.lcs.mit.edu
Connected to larch.lcs.mit.edu.
220 larch.lcs.mit.edu FTP server (Version 5.88 Fri Jan 28 16:03:38 EST 1994) ready.
Name (larch.lcs.mit.edu:horning): anonymous
331 Guest login ok, send ident as password.
Password:
230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp> cd pub/Larch
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> ls
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.
total 5833
drwxr-xr-x  2 root     users        1024 Nov  7 08:14 Experimental
drwxr-xr-x  2 root     users        2560 Oct  7 12:03 Old
-rw-r--r--  1 root     users        7361 Aug 11 17:35 README
-rw-r--r--  1 root     users       81073 May  9  1993 larchDocs.tar.Z
drwxr-xr-x  3 root     users        1536 Nov 15 13:04 lclint
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root     users     1099593 Mar 22  1993 lp2.4.decmips.Z
-rw-r--r--  1 root     users      445585 Mar 22  1993 lp2.4.lib.tar.Z
-rw-r--r--  1 root     users     1371259 Mar 22  1993 lp2.4.sparc.Z
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root     users      259283 Mar 22  1993 lp2.4.vax.Z
-rw-r--r--  1 root     users     1602399 Jan 24  1994 lp2.4a.sparc.Z
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root     users      342089 Mar 22  1993 lsl2.4.decmips.Z
-rw-r--r--  1 root     users       43588 Mar 26  1993 lsl2.4.lib.tar.Z
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root     users      321193 Mar 22  1993 lsl2.4.sunos.Z
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root     users      288419 Mar 22  1993 lsl2.4.vax.Z
226 Transfer complete.
ftp> quit
221 Goodbye.
gatekeeper 2> ...
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