From: Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>
...
But I do think that IETF standards could benefit from more formal
description languages for protocols. So I thank ITU folks for their
efforts to show this to us. I'll be interested to see what SDL looks
like.
...
Oh, golly, just what we need, more of the "put it into this
language/checker/verifier/magic box and it will come out perfect"
stuff that has been so productive for the last 25 or 30 years in general
computer programming and for the last 15 years for network protocols.
I'm sorry for being so rude, but if you've been around a while, you've
seen and should have learned from the final outcomes of design processes
(including some for network protocols) that overtly involved formal
"methodologies." It's not that formal thinking is not useful and valuable,
because it is. Instead it seems that formal mechansms are always sold
as a substitute for design skill and talent, but end up consuming a lot
of both that should have been spent on designing the nominal product,
while the nominal product comes out as OSI 87 layer cake.
Now of course, I'll be told I'm all wrong, that the Space Shuttle
software is a wonderful example of how to do things right, that the
next use of a correctness prover will be for something really impressive
like a gcd algorithm that handles negative numbers, that XTP didn't
fail in the marketplace on its own defects, and similar stories.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com