This monograph aims to provide a powerful general-purpose proof tech nique for the verification of systems, whether finite or infinite. It extends the idea of finite local model-checking, which was introduced by Stirling and Walker: rather than traversing the entire state space of a model, as is done for model-checking in the sense of Emerson, Clarke et ai. (checking whether a (finite) model satisfies a formula), local model-checking asks whether a particular state satisfies a formula, and only explores the nearby states far enough to answer that question. The technique used was a tableau...

Algebraic specification, nondeterminism and term rewriting are three active research areas aiming at concepts for the abstract description of software systems: Algebraic specifications are well-suited for describing data structures and sequential software systems in an abstract way. Term rewriting methods are used in many prototyping systems and form the basis for executing specifi cations. Nondeterminism plays a major role in formal language theory; in programming it serves for delaying design decisions in program development and occurs in a "natural" way in formalisations of distributed...

To construct a compiler for a modern higher-level programming languagel one needs to structure the translation to a machine-like intermediate language in a way that reflects the semantics of the language. little is said about such struc- turing in compiler texts that are intended to cover a wide variety of program- ming languages. More is said in the Iiterature on semantics-directed compiler construction 1] but here too the viewpoint is very general (though limited to 1 languages with a finite number of syntactic types). On the other handl there is a considerable body of work using the...