History
The origins of VDM-SL lie in the IBM Laboratory in Vienna where the first version of the language was called the Vienna Definition Language (VDL). The VDL was essentially used for giving operational semantics descriptions in contrast to the VDM - Meta-IV which provided denotational semantics
«Towards the end of 1972 the Vienna group again turned their attention to the problem of systematically developing a compiler from a language definition. The overall approach adopted has been termed the "Vienna Development Method"... The meta-language actually adopted ("Meta-IV") is used to define major portions of PL/1 (as given in ECMA 74 - interestingly a "formal standards document written as an abstract interpreter") in BEKIČ 74.»
So Meta-IV, was "used to define major portions of" the PL/I programming language. Other programming languages described, or partially described, using Meta-IV and VDM-SL include the BASIC programming language, FORTRAN, the APL programming language, ALGOL 60, the Ada programming language and the Pascal programming language. Meta-IV evolved into several variants, generally described as the Danish, English and Irish Schools.
The "English School" derived from work by Cliff Jones on the aspects of VDM not specifically related to language definition and compiler design (Jones 1980, 1990). It stresses modelling persistent state through the use of data types constructed from a rich collection of base types. Functionality is typically described through operations which may have side-effects on the state and which are mostly specified implicitly using a precondition and postcondition. The "Danish School" (Bjørner et al. 1982) has tended to stress a constructive approach with explicit operational specification used to a greater extent. Work in the Danish school led to the first European validated Ada compiler.
An ISO Standard for the language was released in 1996 (ISO, 1996).
Read more about this topic: Vienna Development Method
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