A model-based standard for SDL

  • Authors:

  • Andreas Prinz;Markus Scheidgen;Merete S. Tveit

  • Affiliations:

  • Faculty of Engineering, Agder University College, Grimstad, Norway;Department of Computer Science, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany;Faculty of Engineering, Agder University College, Grimstad, Norway

  • Venue:
  • SDL'07 Proceedings of the 13th international SDL Forum conference on Design for dependable systems
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Language descriptions have much information captured in plain (English) text, and even the formalised parts are often informally connected with the overall language definition. These imprecise descriptions are hardly usable to automatically generate language tool environments out of the language standard. SDL has already managed to define syntax and semantics in a quite formal way. Currently, this formality is connected by using different types of grammars. Meta-models, however, have proven to be a good way of expressing complex facts and relations. Moreover, there are tools and technologies available realising all language aspects based on completely formal and still easily understandable meta-model-based descriptions. This paper is about an experiment of combining all these existing techniques to create a definition of (a subset of) SDL. This allows to have immediate tool support for the language. This experiment includes the language aspects concrete syntax representation, static semantic constraints, and language behaviour. It turns out that this is almost possible.