Specware is a development environment that runs on top of Lisp. The following sections describe the Specware environment and the basic mechanisms for running Specware.
To start Specware, double-click the Specware 4.0 shortcut on your Desktop, or select Specware 4.0 from the Start Menu -> Program Files -> Specware folder. When Specware is launched, a couple things happen: XEmacs is started and a Lisp image containing Specware is started inside an XEmacs buffer. All of the user interaction (see the next chapter) with Specware occurs at the Lisp prompt.