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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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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Prof. Jeannette Wing, professor of Computer Science at Columbia University (US), has been awarded the FME Fellowship 2024. The Fellowships are awarded every three years in recognition of technical breakthroughs and pioneering work in advancing, applying, and promoting mathematically rigorous methods for the design of computing systems.

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The 79th Business Meeting of FME will take place at Formal Methods 2024 in Milan (Italy), September 12, 2024.

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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). The overall acceptance rate was 34%. As is common these days, artifact evaluations took place. Invited speakers were Cristian Cadar (Imperial College London, UK) and Claire Dross (Adacode, Paris, France). The vibrant, two-day event itself attracted 60 attendees, which makes it the most successful FormaliSE edition thus far. Details can be found at https://formalise2024.github.io.

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The Annual General Meeting of FME will take place online, June 26, 2024.

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The 77th Business Meeting of FME will take place in London (UK), February 1, 2024.

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K. Rustan M. Leino: Program Proofs

MIT Press, 2023, 496 pp, ISBN: 978-0-262546-23-2. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546232/program-proofs/

Summary

The book Program Proofs by Rustan Leino teaches students how to write specifications for functional, imperative, and object-oriented program code and how to prove them correct. The book uses the language and proof tool Dafny. It comes with online code examples and, as teacher’s material, answers to the exercises.

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