The laboratory started with a group led by Heinz Zemanek that moved from the Technische Hochschule (now the Technical University of Vienna).
The group built on ideas of Calvin C. Elgot, Peter Landin, and John McCarthy, to create an operational semantics that could define the whole of IBM's PL/I programming language.
The meta-language used for this was dubbed by people outside the laboratory as the Vienna Definition Language (VDL).
[2] The formal method VDM (Vienna Development Method) was a result of research at the laboratory by Dines Bjørner, Cliff Jones, Peter Lucas, and others.
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