6,695 research outputs found
CONFIGEN: A tool for managing configuration options
This paper introduces CONFIGEN, a tool that helps modularizing software.
CONFIGEN allows the developer to select a set of elementary components for his
software through an interactive interface. Configuration files for use by
C/assembly code and Makefiles are then automatically generated, and we
successfully used it as a helper tool for complex system software refactoring.
CONFIGEN is based on propositional logic, and its implementation faces hard
theoretical problems.Comment: In Proceedings LoCoCo 2010, arXiv:1007.083
The natural history of bugs: using formal methods to analyse software related failures in space missions
Space missions force engineers to make complex trade-offs between many different constraints including cost, mass, power, functionality and reliability. These constraints create a continual need to innovate. Many advances rely upon software, for instance to control and monitor the next generation âelectron cyclotron resonanceâ ion-drives for deep space missions.Programmers face numerous challenges. It is extremely difficult to conduct valid ground-based tests for the code used in space missions. Abstract models and simulations of satellites can be misleading. These issues are compounded by the use of âband-aidâ software to fix design mistakes and compromises in other aspects of space systems engineering. Programmers must often re-code missions in flight. This introduces considerable risks. It should, therefore, not be a surprise that so many space missions fail to achieve their objectives. The costs of failure are considerable. Small launch vehicles, such as the U.S. Pegasus system, cost around 4 million up to 73 million from the failure of a single uninsured satellite. It is clearly important that we learn as much as possible from those failures that do occur. The following pages examine the roles that formal methods might play in the analysis of software failures in space missions
Experimenting with (Conditional) Perfection
Conditional perfection is the phenomenon in which conditionals are strengthened to biconditionals. In some contexts, âIf A, Bâ is understood as if it meant âA if and only if B.â We present and discuss a series of experiments designed to test one of the most promising pragmatic accounts of conditional perfection. This is the idea that conditional perfection is a form of exhaustificationâthat is a strengthening to an exhaustive reading, triggered by a question that the conditional answers. If a speaker is asked how B comes about, then the answer âIf A, Bâ is interpreted exhaustively to meaning that A is the only way to bring about B. Hence, âA if and only if B.â We uncover evidence that conditional perfection is a form of exhaustification, but not that it is triggered by a relationship to a salient question
The meaning of meaning-fallibilism
Much discussion of meaning by philosophers over the last 300 years has been predicated on a Cartesian first-person authority (i.e. âinfallibilismâ) with respect to what oneâs terms mean. However this has problems making sense of the way the meanings of scientific terms develop, an increase in scientific knowledge over and above scientistsâ ability to quantify over new entities. Although a recent conspicuous embrace of rigid designation has broken up traditional meaning-infallibilism to some extent, this new dimension to the meaning of terms such as âwaterâ is yet to receive a principled epistemological undergirding (beyond the deliverances of âintuitionâ with respect to certain somewhat unusual possible worlds).
Charles Peirceâs distinctive, naturalistic philosophy of language is mined to provide a more thoroughly fallibilist, and thus more realist, approach to meaning, with the requisite epistemology. Both his pragmatism and his triadic account of representation, it is argued, produce an original approach to meaning, analysing it in processual rather than objectual terms, and opening a distinction between âmeaning for usâ, the meaning a term has at any given time for any given community and âmeaning simpliciterâ, the way use of a given term develops over time (often due to a posteriori input from the world which is unable to be anticipated in advance). This account provocatively undermines a certain distinction between âsemanticsâ and âontologyâ which is often taken for granted in discussions of realism
- âŚ