Language Prototyping: An Algebraic Specification Approach

Abstract

Preface This book collects the efforts developed by a series of researchers, presented at AMAST Workshops on Real-Time Systems. The authors whose papers were selected for this book are major players in this area, and they were given the opportunity to refine the text of their papers as a result of the lively discussions that took place during the workshops. The refining of the papers continued all through the editing process as well. The papers were carefully selected and revised by the editors and grouped into six parts debating subjects on the modeling and analysis, verification, synthesis, tools, and applications of real-time systems. The editors considered that these divisions made the book more coherent, and therefore, more readable. It is almost futile to say that there is a large amount of research and literature on the subject of real-time systems. The subject is of great importance and it is resuscitating large interest in the research community. Great efforts have been made towards a clear understanding of the nature, features and particularities of real-time systems. As a result, a series of approaches of the field problems have been attempted. The variety of the latter spans over a vast spectrum of theoretical frameworks, from finite state machines to mathematical models expressed in various versions of the lambda calculus and so are also the practical methodologies that have resulted by applying the above. As real-time systems are, as the name shows, systems, a systemic approach is needed, which unfortunately is very difficult to set. The difficulty stems from the combination of processes, some modeled by a set of differential/difference equations, and others by logic statements and their computer control algorithms, which usually involve first-order and/or temporal logic statements. The above facts have led to an arabesque of WorldScientific/ws-b8-5x6-0 amastBook viii Preface mathematical symbols and "theories" generated for the purpose of finding an appropriate model for the above combination of processes. It is needless to say that the field has attracted the attention of mathematicians, computer engineers, and computer and control theory scientists. It is also needless to say that the application of theoretical findings has had a large echo in the designers' and implementers' of real-time systems communities activating in the domains of telecommunications, power generation, metallurgy , aviation, and many other industries. Confronted with the difficulty of the field, the practitioners' community is in permanent expectation of new approaches and results, which should show them the light: a unified theory and practice capturing the essence of designing correct and at least sound real-time applications. As in other fields, designers and implementers of real-time applications expect to map in a coherent way the theoretical conquests to the reality of their projects. Thus, any book in this field should be in great demand. Related to the above, a fact must be mentioned: "the book" is not yet out. Here...

Transforming Process Algebra Models into UML State Machines: Bridging a Semantic Gap?

“…We use the term rewriting system ASF+SDF [22,23] for the development of our metamodels and for the implementation of our transformation. Transformations between languages is one of the main applications of ASF+SDF.…”

Tool-Assisted Specification and Verification of Typed Low-Level Languages

“…Some of these difficulties can be solved by using a dedicated prototyping environment that helps addressing some/most administrative aspects of formal semantics. A number of tools have been designed for this purpose, including ASF+SDF [21], ASMGofer [12], Centaur [14], Letos [25] and RML [39]. While very diverse in their design and functionalities, these tools all provide a readable format for specifying the formal semantics of a programming language, and support to execute the semantics, which in particular allows to check that the semantics reflects the intended behavior of the language.…”

Interactive Disambiguation of Meta Programs with Concrete Object Syntax

“…Concrete object syntax can be syntactically checked as meta programs are compiled. This technique is now supported by many meta-programming systems [2,3,4,7,12].…”