« Stuff I read | Main | Lemma One »
March 08, 2007
The ASM method
I used to be a serious doubter of anything that dealt with executable specifications. I still do, but now I understand why, and so when it is OK to talk about executable specifications -- but that is another story.
So what won me over? A few months ago, a wonderful talk by Egon Börger, dealing (in part) with Abstract State Machines (ASM) and Ground Models. There, I finally saw the mathematical generality and abstraction level possible. Of course, I am still not a huge fan (it uses state, yuck), but the basic ideas are most definitely very very good. Most bizarrely, I had attended a talk some years ago by Yuri Gurevich on essentially the same idea, but he concentrated on other aspects of ASMs so I did not "get it" at that time. Oh well, that's ok, since it forced me to think long and hard about programming and specification languages, which was definitely worth it.
Posted by Carette at March 8, 2007 10:48 AM