The ISO term is Formal Description Technique (FDT).
A Formal Description is both a guide for implementors and it also allows
dissemination of a protocol through manufacturers.
An Formal Description allows humans to reason about protocol.
It simplifies the job of designing new protocols by providing
a common framework
for the common parts of any protocol (this is
analogous to using ALGOL type language to specify sequential algorithms).
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This author finds formal methods genuinely useful. They are at their
best when applied early in the design stage to capture the system
behavior and enable analysis of typical and boundary condition cases.
They are at their least useful in communicating with a client. In the
complex multilingual world of heterogeneous distributed systems, they
are a touchstone or <#826#> babel fish<#826#>.
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