A comparative evaluation of the Z, CSP, RSL, and VDM languages

The software engineering process has been described in many ways. Today, few of these deal specifically with the use of formal methods in software engineering. New software engineering uses formal specification languages in system analysis, requirement analysis, and system design to develop software for critical-safety systems. Formal specification languages describe the system at a much higher level than a programming language. They are catego-rized into model-oriented, constructive, algebraic, process model, hybrid, and logical. This paper describes the properties and types of formal specification languages in software engineering. It then compares the Z, VDM, RSL, and CSP formal specification lan-guages from different point of views.