Where Specification and Programming Meet

The authors argue that a modern programming language such as Scala has achieved a level of succinctness, which makes it suitable for program/systems specification, hence able to take the role that early very elegant specification languages, way ahead of their time, served. They illustrate this by comparing the VDM++ specification language with Scala. They furthermore illustrate Scala's potential as a specification language by augmenting it with a combination of parameterized state machines and temporal logic, defined as a library, thereby forming a very expressive and convenient runtime verification framework.