Introduction to the proceedings of the J.R. Abrial conference, a pioneer in the scientific development of computer languages and formal methods and their large-scale application in industry, Nantes, May 27, 2025
Introduction Henri Habrias henri.habrias@univ-nantes.fr The last thing you find when writing a book is knowing which one to put first . Blaise Pascal, Discourse on the Passions of Love My first computer science books were Meyer and Baudoin's Programming Methods, Mickaël Jackson's books, Jean-Dominique Warnier's books, and Delobel Adiba's Databases and Relational Systems. I quickly supplemented these with those by Tony Hoare (CSP) and Robin Milner (CCS), whose teaching methods I appreciated. At that time, I was doing what was called "method integration," in addition to "methodology," the study of methods (1), a term that was used in the timetable when I arrived at the IUT of Nantes. Naive set theory—which I didn't experience in high school—(2) was implemented in Warnier's LCP. When I introduced it to some colleagues trained in computer science, the reception wasn't warm. J.R. Abrial recounts the same thing in his lecture at the Collège ...