The ergo support system: an integrated set of tools for prototyping integrated environments

Abstract

The Ergo Support System (ESS) is an engineering framework for experimentation and prototyping to support the application of formal methods to program development, ranging from program analysis and derivation to proof-theoretic approaches. The ESS is a growing suite of tools that are linked together by means of a set of abstract interfaces. The principal engineering challenge is the design of abstract interfaces that are semantically rich and yet flexible enough to permit experimentation with a wide variety of formally-based program and proof development paradigms and associated languages. As part of the design of ESS, several abstract interface designs have been developed that provide for more effective component integration while preserving flexibility and the potential for scaling. A benefit of the open architecture approach of ESS is the ability to mix formal and informal approaches in the same environment architecture. The ESS has already been applied in a number of formal methods experiments.

Languages Beyond Ada and Lisp

“…A few projects, like Edinburgh LF [HHP87], ERGO [LPRS88], and Larch [GHW85], and the somewhat less instantiated work on institutions [GB85] address some aspects of the integration problem, but only within limited domains. For example, institutions promote sharing and reuse by abstracting the common features and structure of logical systems and permitting specific logics to be composed from common components.…”

Ott: Effective tool support for the working semanticist

“…Again it is a programming environment, with a generic syntaxdirected editor. The ERGO Support System (Lee et al 1988) also had a strong userinterface component, but targeted (among others) ADT-OBJ and λProlog. Mosses's work on Action Semantics and Modular SOS (Mosses 2002) has been supported by various tools, but makes strong assumptions on the form of the semantic relations being defined.…”

Horizontal Composability Revisited

“…Such a degree of formalization and modularization would be useful not just for achieving correctness but also for restricting the scope of re-checking required when the system is modified subsequently. Scherlis and Scott's Inferential Programming paper [SS83], which led to the Ergo project at CMU [LPRS88], contains some more detailed ideas along similar lines.…”