An abstract software specification technique based on structural recursion
Herbert Alois Klaeren · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 1980
specifications of software modules are frequently represented by triples where S is meant to be a certain set of sorts, X a set of operations over S and E a set of e x p ! a n a t i o n s of the semantics of the operations and their relations to each other.Algebraic specification techniques take E to be a set of Z-equations, sometimes also called algebraic axioms.The pair is called a signature.As implementations of the abstract software module specified by one accepts all S-sorted E-algebras which satisfy the equations E. There is even a canonical representative for the abstract module, the initial -a l g e b r a