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Does every Computer Scientist need to know Formal Methods?

FME’s Teaching Committee has recently organised a special issue of Formal Aspects of Computing that puts forward different perspectives on why and how Formal Methods should be represented in Computer Science curricula. The discussion was triggered by the guidelines that ACM has been publishing for computer technology university curricula for more than five decades.

A summar article of the discussed perspectives appeared in the December 2024 issue of ACM Inroads: The Role of Formal Methods in Computer Science Education.

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Book Review: Understanding Programming Languages

Cliff B. Jones: Understanding Programming Languages

Springer, November 2020, 229 pp, ISBN: 978-3-030-59256-1. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59257-8

Summary

The book Understanding Programming Languages by Cliff B. Jones is about the formal specification of the semantics of programming languages. It focuses on the structural operational semantics of imperative and sequential languages, including features such as blocks and procedures, with an extension to concurrent objects at the end of the book. The material is presented with great clarity and requires almost no background knowledge, making the book perfectly suitable for any person curious about programming languages and seeking a deeper understanding of how they work. This book is also for language designers, as being formally precise is an invaluable tool to help catch design issues early in the design phase.

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FormaliSE 2024 & 2025

FormaliSE 2024 took place on 14-15 April 2024, in Lisbon, Portugal, as a co-hosted conference of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE2024). Carlo A. Furia (Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland) and Antónia Lopes (University of Lisbon, Portugal) were this year’s PC Co-chairs. 41 papers were submitted, which is amongst the highest level in recent years, of which 14 were accepted (11 full research papers, 1 case study and 2 research ideas).

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