An IDE for software development using tabular expressions

Abstract

We present preliminary work on an IDE for formal software development using tabular expressions as the basis for precise specifications and descriptions of software behaviour. MotivationFormal software specification and design techniques, when combined with analysis and verification tools, can significantly increase the confidence that software will behave as required. Such techniques, however, usually require documents to be produced that include fairly complex mathematical expressions, which can often be effectively presented as tabular expressions. Traditional documentation tools have proven to be insufficient for this purpose. We hope to improve this situation by developing tools that support both the production and maintenance of good documentation and the application of this documentation to such tasks as design analysis, verification and testing.Although tabular expressions could be useful in many forms of documentation, our emphasis will be on documents that either specify or describe behaviour of software entities using relations on the quantities that are input and output from the component [21]. Rather than define a specification language, per se, we use * This work was carried out while all 3 authors were at

A Tabular Expression Toolbox for Matlab/Simulink

“…Examples of table tools for software engineering include an Eclipse IDE plugin for designing tabular expressions using the OMDoc language to represent tables and PVS for verification purposes [4]. The SCR * toolset [5] supports a wide variety of tables and formal analysis techniques but is only available under strict licensing terms.…”