Integrating a Formal Development for DSLs into Meta-Modeling

Generation of Inductive Types from Ecore Metamodels

“…So the metamodel has to be transformed into types, such that instances of this metamodel could be transformed into manipulable terms conforming to these types. Such a transformation has already been studied in [9]. Authors have defined a bidirectional transformation between Ecore and Isabelle's inductive type: each abstract class A is mapped to an inductive type t; and each concrete class C is transformed to a constructor c of the inductive type a mapped from the super class A of C. Fields of class C are mapped to formal parameters of constructors c. Examples given in Section 3 illustrate this transformation scheme on a simple case.…”

“…Rascal [13] comes with another similar transformation. Instead of restricting the metamodel, the transformation described in [13] leverages a preprocessing step of the metamodel before the scheme of [9] is used. First, structural features are pushed to concrete classes (same as our step 6 in Figure 4); then references are generalized, i.e., a reference to any class C is replaced with a reference to C's most general super class, hence flattening the inheritance tree to two levels.…”

Effective Bridging Between Ecore and Coq: Case of a Type-Checker with Proof-Carrying Code

“…The parameters of a constructor describe the data structure of the value, hence they encode both the attributes and the parent-children relationships between the nodes in the abstract syntax tree. Following the principle drawn by Djeddai et al [7], each abstract class A is turned into an inductive type A, and any concrete class C that specializes A is transformed to a constructor C that belongs to inductive type A. In the example of Klint et al [8] propose preprocessing steps to support arbitrary source metamodels.…”

“…The transformation first pulls class members down the specialization relationship, generalizes referenced classes then flattens the specialization relationship. Then the same principle as in [7] is applied to generate inductive types.…”

“…Like stated in Section 3.1, our work is based on and improves previous work on transforming a metamodel into a group of inductive types. In comparison to [7], our improved transformation does not suffer from any restriction on the source metamodel. In comparison to [8], we further improve support for multiple inheritance as we need not assume existence of a unique most-general super class for any class.…”