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their gradual adoption into processes and by people already in place. This means much
more collaboration between tools developers, very likely via open platforms, in order
to give users the flexibility to balance effort and insight.
From a teaching perspective, we ought to be liberal in our use of a range of for-
malisms supported by tools in order to encourage the breadth of experience that will
allow graduate engineers to select appropriate technology. We should not expect every-
one to be interested in how we express formal semantics, but we should adopt course
content and delivery styles that help them to feel the benefits of a little abstraction and
rigour.
Formal approaches have been widely, but often quietly, adopted in modern pro-
gramming languages and development environments. Industry-leading programming
notations now include possibilities for increased abstraction through of abstract types
such as sets, sequences and mappings and use of concepts such as invariants, pre and
post-conditions formulated using predicates. None of these advances will be known as
'formal methods'. Dines Bjørner, Zhou Chaochen and so many others have worked to
create technology so fundamental that it disappears into the fabric of software and sys-
tems engineering. Surely this is an achievement to be proud of.
Acknowledgments. We are grateful to the organisers of the Festschrift Symposium for
the opportunity to prepare this paper, and most especially to Dines Bjørner for the lively
inspiration, support and encouragement he has provided to us both over many years. As
always we are grateful to our many colleagues involved in the current VDM Tools and
Overture initiatives, especially Shin Sahara and Marcel Verhoef, for their contributions
to the work reported in this paper and to Jeremy Bryans and Hugo Daniel Macedo for
their helpful comments on a draft of this paper.
References
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