Re: Formal methods
- Posted by Bayes Jun 12, 2009
- 1319 views
I've not heard of "formal" methods, can you give us a URL to learn a bit about it?
There's an entry in wikipedia (google "Formal Methods"), but it's not very helpful. There are lot of different methods but what distinguishes them as "formal" is that they all use discrete mathematics (set theory and symbolic logic) to design and prove that algorithms are correct. I appreciate that not everyone enjoys maths but it's not the number crunching type of maths, it's more to do with constructing models which mirror your program function and then reasoning about them so that the actual code is much more likely to be bug-free. It might help to look at the page which outlines the course I'm thinking of doing:
http://www3.open.ac.uk/courses/bin/p12.dll?C01M263
If you have a degree in CS (I don't) some of the topics will be familiar, but from what I've heard the usual discrete maths topics aren't presented in a way which makes them useful for program design or verification.
Also you could look at a few pages of this book and read the reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Programming-Monographs-Computer/dp/0387964800
