Weak formal methods ?

First an analogy:
when first small scale integrated circuits came on the market
experimenters built digital circuits by busking since they didn't
yet know how to 'read the score'. One used an intuitive
designing method to chose various combinations and
configuratins of gates to acheive the desired result.

Later, simple tools like Karnaugh maps and equations to
get cannonical forms ...etc. were use to replace the art
with some science.
--------
It seems to me that the pre & post conditions advocated
eg. by Eiffel provide a type of weak formal method for
software design ?

Occasionally, like now, I want to write a small routine to:
FOR StartLine TO EndLine DO
RemoveMultipleConsecutiveSpaces;
I.e. remove the extra spaces -- which I remember WS
could insert for text to fill the line nicely.

I'm too old & tired to fire up the attention and concentration
to do this without many iterations, and expect to just
modify a sample out of a library of examples.

Idealy such a library of example sources would include the
pre & post conditions like Eiffel or Oberon.

Q - are there online lists of examples for such trivial tasks,
perhaps eg. as part of Eiffel tutors ?

Thanks for any feedback,

== Chris Glur.

problems@gmail wrote:
>
> First an analogy:
>
> when first small scale integrated circuits came on the market
> experimenters built digital circuits by busking since they
> didn't yet know how to 'read the score'. One used an intuitive
> designing method to chose various combinations and
> configuratins of gates to acheive the desired result.
>
> Later, simple tools like Karnaugh maps and equations to get
> cannonical forms ...etc. were use to replace the art with some
> science.

FYI Karnaugh maps, logical equations etc. were in common use back
in the 1930s, and date back much earlier than that. Telephone
systems, using relays, required lots of digital knowledge.

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
<http://cbfalconer.home.att.net>


--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

On Sun, 2007-10-28 at 20:35 -0500, problems@gmail wrote:

> Occasionally, like now, I want to write a small routine to:
> FOR StartLine TO EndLine DO
> RemoveMultipleConsecutiveSpaces;
> I.e. remove the extra spaces -- which I remember WS
> could insert for text to fill the line nicely.

The STRING class has some routines that I guess will be
helpful here. See http://www.gobosoft.com/eiffel/nice/elks01/string.html

feature -- Access
...
feature -- Removal
...

If this requires too many intuitions, so to speak, you can also get
Lex style parsing from that place, and probably REs with replacements.


-- Georg Bauhaus