Converting a conventional contract into an electronic equivalent that can be executed and enforced by computers is a challenging task. The difficulties are caused by the ambiguities that the original human-oriented text is likely to contain. The conversion process involves the conversion of the original text into mathematical notation. This paper discusses how standard conventional contracts ca...

when testing a program, correctly executed test cases are seldom explored further, even though they may carry useful information. Metamorphic testing proposes to generate follow-up test cases to check important properties of the target function. It does not need a human oracle for output prediction and comparison. An “oracle” in software testing is a procedure by which testers can decide whethe...

New measures, summarizing several variables related to a common health construct are frequently developed in the healthcare industry to provide more valid or complete descriptions of quality and health concepts. We created a SAS® program to calculate a measure of diet quality, the Healthy Eating Index (HEI, http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/HealthyEatingIndex.htm) using output from a widely applied diet...

Estimates of economic activity generated and jobs created that are derived using input-output analysis are often presented in program evaluations and confused with the benefit s resultin g from die program. Two such cases are presented as examples. We argue that for two main reason s this type of analysis con stitutes a misuse of input-output analysis. First, input-output estimates generated us...

In this tutorial, we program big-step and small-step total interpreters for the While language extended with input and output primitives. While is a simple imperative language consisting of skip, assignment, sequence, conditional and loop. We first develop trace-based interpreters for While. Traces are potentially infinite nonempty sequences of states. The interpreters assign traces to While pr...

In this paper, a real-world test problem is presented and made available for use by the EMO community. The problem deals with the optimization of polymer extrusion, in terms of setting the operating conditions and/or the screw geometry. The binary code of a computer program that predicts the thermomechanical experience of a polymer inside the machine, as a function of geometry, polymer properti...

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that a method for inductive program synthesis (as described in [SW98]) can be applied to the problem of learning cyclic (iterative/recursive) macro-operations from planning. Input in the program synthesis system is a so-called initial program which represents an ordered set of straight-forward transformations from input states to the desired output. In t...

interpretation is a tool for constructing semantics based program analyses. These notes are written for the Introduction to Semantics course and assume knowledge of the Introduction to Domain Theory notes. They present some of the basic ideas in abstract interpretation using examples of program analyses expressed in this framework. The current version is still not completely finished. Suggestio...