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International Workshop on Abstract State Machines

ASM 2000: Abstract State Machines - Theory and Applications pp 242–265Cite as

On the Formal Semantics of SDL-2000:A Compilation Approach Based on an Abstract SDL Machine

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1912))

Abstract

In November 1999, a new version of SDL (Specification and Description Language) called SDL-2000 has passed ITU, an international standardization body for telecommunication. SDL is a fairly complex, graphical formal description technique for the development of distributed systems, and has been broadly used in industry for many years. Efforts to define the semantics of SDL-2000 formally have started early in 1998. By now, a draft formal semantics is available, which is determined to become the official formal SDL semantics after its approval in 2000. It is based on the formalism of Abstract State Machines (ASMs), which has been selected for several reasons including intelligibility and executability. The formal semantics of SDL addresses the static semantics, transformation rules, and the dynamic semantics. The approach taken to define the dynamic semantics is particularly interesting. Although basically being operational, it differs from existing approaches in several ways. In this paper, we address and highlight some of these differences, using a simplified specification language called SSL instead of SDL. In defining a formal dynamic semantics for SSL, we formally describe an abstract machine, a compilation function mapping SSL specifications to code of this machine, and an operational definition of the set of initial states, using ASM as the underlying formalism. Furthermore, we present in some detail the semantics of SSL procedure calls.

SDL is defined by the ITU-T, the Telecommunication Standardization Sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), in their Recommendation Z.100 [20].

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing Science, University of Kaiserslautern, D-67653, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Robert Eschbach & Reinhard Gotzhein

  2. Heinz Nixdorf Institute, University of Paderborn, D-33102, Paderborn, Germany

    Uwe Glässer

  3. Department of Computer Science, Humboldt-University Berlin, D-12489, Berlin, Germany

    Andreas Prinz

Authors
  1. Robert Eschbach
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  2. Uwe Glässer
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  3. Reinhard Gotzhein
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  4. Andreas Prinz
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, USA

    Yuri Gurevich

  2. ETH Zürich, Institute TIK Gloriastr., 35, 8092, Zürich, Switzerland

    Philipp W. Kutter

  3. EPFL Lausanne, DI IN-Ecublens, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Martin Odersky

  4. ETH Zürich, Institute TIK Gloriastr., 35, 8092, Zürich, Switzerland

    Lothar Thiele

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Eschbach, R., Glässer, U., Gotzhein, R., Prinz, A. (2000). On the Formal Semantics of SDL-2000:A Compilation Approach Based on an Abstract SDL Machine. In: Gurevich, Y., Kutter, P.W., Odersky, M., Thiele, L. (eds) Abstract State Machines - Theory and Applications. ASM 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1912. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44518-8_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44518-8_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67959-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44518-0

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