DERIVATION OF SCIENTIFIC SOFTWARE FROM MATHEMATICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Often the modification and enhancement of large scientific software sy stems are severely hampered because many components of the system are written in an implementation dependent fashion, they are inadequately documented, and their functionalities are not precisely known. In this paper we consider how mathematics may be employed to alleviate some o f these problems. In particular, we illustrate how the formal specific ation notation VDM-SL is being used to specify precisely abstract data types for use in the development of scientific software.