Why Specifications Don't Compose • Hillel Wayne
Recently my friend Lars Hupel and I had a discussion on why formal methods don’t compose well. You can read the conversation here. We focused mostly on composing formally-verified code. I want to talk a little more about the difficulties in composing specifications. This is half because it’s difficult for interesting reasons and half because it’s a common question from beginners.
Beginners to formal specification expect specifications should be organized like programs: multiple independent modules that interact through public interfaces, where the modules don’t know about each others’ private implementations.
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