Abstraction and Specification in Program Development

Liskov, B., & Guttag, J. (1986). Abstraction and Specification in Program Development. MIT Press.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1986

Link

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262121125/abstraction-and-specification-in-program-development/

Cited from

computer_science, engineering_design

Cited by

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Information Hiding
  • The stable public contract is the behavioural promise: put(k,v) then get(k) returns v, in expected constant time — a guarantee that holds regardless of whether the internals later switch from open addressing to chaining, or from one hash function to another.

    This sourceAbstract data types and behavioral specification — a stable contract (e.g., put-then-get returns the value in expected constant time) that holds regardless of the concealed representation.

• Interface
  • A function signature (interface) abstracts the implementation, but the interface itself is what the caller sees and depends upon.

    This sourceDistinguishes abstraction (the cognitive principle of hiding detail) from interface specification (the structural mechanism that realizes abstraction at module boundaries).

Verification

Does it exist? Not checked yet. This entry carries no identifier to resolve. It was extracted from the citation as written in the article, normalized, and deduplicated against the rest of the registry.

Does it back the claim? Not recorded. Neither this nor any other of the 2 citations of this work carries a recorded support check.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:72d4fe2f639d · see in the full table