Some ideas about an interactive system to support specifications development

The importance of specifications in quality software production is nowadays widely recognised. It is also recognised that conventional programming languages are not suitable for talking about properties of programs, packages or, more in general, objects which we have to deal with when building and maintaining complex systems. Lot of research is going on on the subject. Techniques and formal languages are studied and compared in order to find the best suitable ones to express specification. The importance of integrated systems to support software development is also widely recognised. Other considerations arise when observing the process that start from the original idea of a project and ends with its implementation, and observing how it nowadays evolves. All this leads us to consider the case that the 'integrated software development system' of the future will be based around specification languages. Three principles are individuated which we believe are fundamental to a system to support interactive development of specification, and which affect both the basic specification language (BSL) of the system and its integrated tools.