  Failure detection protocols---a fundamental building block for crafting
fault-tolerant distributed systems---are in many cases described by their
authors making use of informal pseudo-codes of their conception. Often these
pseudo-codes use syntactical constructs that are not available in COTS
programming languages such as C or C++. This translates into informal
descriptions that call for ad hoc interpretations and implementations. Being
informal, these descriptions cannot be tested by their authors, which may
translate into insufficiently detailed or even faulty specifications. This
paper tackles this problem introducing a formal syntax for those constructs and
a C library that implements them---a tool-set to express and reason about
failure detection protocols. The resulting specifications are longer but non
ambiguous, and eligible for becoming a standard form.
