Groklaw - Digging for Truth

	When you want to know more...

Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines

ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

You won't find me on Facebook

Donate

No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.

What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments

Sponsors

Hosting:

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster

The keyword is "formal". | 202 comments | Create New Account

Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.

The keyword is "formal".

Authored by: Wol on Saturday, February 02 2013 @ 04:14 PM EST

I'd agree.

A formal specification, and a program, is just a function with subfunctions
going down ... the difference is the syntax and the level of detail.

So no a formal specification isn't guaranteed to work (as written) because it
may contain bugs, but I'd say it's (supposedly) the same as a program. After
all, the formal specification of a bubble sort could be

loop from first to last
loop from current to second
if current is less than the one above then swap else terminate inner loop
end loop
end loop
end function

What's left is just journeyman work for a craftsman programmer - those
instructions are more than sufficient to implement the sort in any procedural
language. And maybe others too ... that should be plenty sufficient for a patent
(and to prove that it's maths, too :-)

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )