Specification language
A specification language is a formal language used in computer science. Unlike most programming languages, which are directly executable formal languages used to implement a system, specification languages are used during system analysis and design.
Specification languages are generally not directly executed, although research has been done in this area. They describe the system at a much higher level than a programming language, and thus must be subject to a process of refinement (the filling-in of implementation detail) before they can actually be implemented.
Hartmann pipelines are an exception to this. Properly applied, pipelines may be considered a dataflow specification which is directly executable.
An important use of specification languages is enabling the creation of proofs of program correctness (see theorem prover).
Specification languages
- Alloy language
- Assertion definition language
- B specification language
- Extended ML
- SDL
- Unified Modeling Language
- VDM specification language
- Z specification language
- Hartmann pipeline