the respected author believes that true faith is actually a logical assertion of faith [within] or entrenched certainty towards the objects of faith. naturally this logical assertion can only be considered as faith while it doesn’t accompany denial of the objects of faith. he believes that the freedom to choose faith is related to the freedom to choose when faith first comes about and whether i...

Robert Stalnaker argues that his causal-pragmatic account of the problem of intentionality commits him to a coarse-grained conception of the contents of mental states, where propositions are represented as sets of possible worlds. Stalnaker also accepts the ‘‘direct reference’’ theory of names, according to which co-referring names have the same content. Stalnaker’s view of content is thus thre...

Assertion-based verification (ABV) has been adopted by many successful companies in the global electronics market to help them improve design quality and reduce time-to-market. ABV has evolved in response to the problem of not being able to adequately verify a design’s functional operation. As designs have gotten bigger and design cycles have gotten shorter, traditional simulation has failed to...

JML was designed to be written and read by working Java programmers. In this paper we illustrate how the current JML assertion semantics is likely to appear counter intuitive to such programmers. An alternative semantics is discussed.

We revisit the connection between equality assertion checking in programs and unification that was recently described in [8]. Using a general formalization of this connection, we establish interesting connections between the complexity of assertion checking in programs and unification theory of the underlying program expressions. In particular, we show that assertion checking is: (a) PTIME for ...

Researchers have debated whether knowledge or certainty is a better candidate for the norm of assertion. Should you make an assertion only if you know it’s true? Or should you make an assertion only if you’re certain it’s true? If either knowledge or certainty is a better candidate, then this will likely have detectable behavioral consequences. I report an experiment that tests for relevant beh...

Programmers use assertion to enforce design by contract. However, in Object-Oriented Programming, assertion has few drawbacks. One drawback is that assertion may prevent the reuse of a class. Another is that programmers cannot express assertion about inter-object relations. Using Aspect-Oriented Programming technique, which enables to describe a crosscutting concern in one module, programmers c...