The role of logic is striking. The notation employed in formal specification includes logical notation. The perception that the meaning of a specification can be taken to be a presentation of a logical theory underlies the approach to the semantics of specification languages which is applied in this book. Modularization mechanisms for building large structured specifications are regarded as operations for adapting and combining presentations of logical theories of a special kind. A large software system often needs a precise specification of its intended behaviour.
Formal specification refers to the use of such a specification language in writing specifications.
This book describes the outcome of a project which addressed the problem of giving a formal semantics for a specification language. This area is still in development. A main aim of this book is to illustrate a particular approach to tackle the problem of giving a formal semantics for a specification language. It is a specification language which is directly motivated by actual practices of software engineering. This book contains a presentation of this mathematical framework and a presentation of a formal semantics of VVSL based on this framework.