A Study on Components and Assembly Primitives in B

Abstract

. This paper is the result of a reflexion coming from the usage and learning of the language B. It tries to better explain and understand the assembly primitives includes and uses of the language. It presents a high-level notion of components and develops a "component algebra". This algebra is specialized to deal with the B-components. The B assembly primitives are re-expressed in this basic formalism. Some problems about independence of concepts in the B methodology are pointed out and are discussed. 1 Introduction Specifications, like programs, must be modular because very large formal texts are not understandable for a human being. So, the study of modules and modularization is one of the issues in software engineering. The three main objectives of modularization [BHK90] are : information hiding, compositionality of module operations and reusability of modules. If the specification methodology encompasses the need for formal proofs to ensure consistency, as it is the case in the B ..