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International Workshop on Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language and Method

SOFL+MSVL 2018: Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language and Method pp 125–145Cite as

Formal Semantics and Tool Support for a Syntactically Restricted Dialect of SOFL

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11392))

Abstract

SOFL is a well-known industrially applied software design language to be used within the framework of a formal engineering method (FEM). Though SOFL is easy to grasp and intuitively usable by practitioners, its original syntax permits the construction of ‘funny’ specifications (which cannot sensibly be implemented) and its semantics is not precisely defined. In the project described in this paper we have defined a restricted dialect of SOFL which can be parsed for syntactical correctness, and the semantics of which is well-defined. The static semantics of a SOFL specification can now be formally checked by means of an SMT solver, (SMT: Satisfiability ‘modulo theory’) whereas the dynamic semantics is provided by way of translation into a process algebra (the semantics of which is already given). Already available process algebra tools can then be used to formally check a well-constructed SOFL specification for interesting behavioural properties.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    EMF: Eclipse Modeling Framework.

  2. 2.

    For the definition of ‘satisfiability’ in SOFL see [14, Definition 25, p. 304].

  3. 3.

    In earlier work we demonstrated the usefulness of such a ‘translational’ approach in the context of CSP specifications of wireless sensor networks [25].

  4. 4.

    Working with approximations is very common in the field of formal methods.

  5. 5.

    https://gitlab.com/JohanVdBerg/sofl-editor.git.

  6. 6.

    As we are addressing our paper to an audience of SOFL experts, we presume throughout this paper that our readers are already familiar with the contents of [14].

  7. 7.

    Personal communication (e-mail) by Shaoying Liu: “In principle, SOFL specification inspection does not support formal proof simply because it is rather difficult for ordinary engineers, but for some critical applications formal proof may be valuable” (8 Nov. 2013).

  8. 8.

    https://github.com/eclipse/xsemantics.

  9. 9.

    This had been noticed by one of our anonymous reviewers.

  10. 10.

    This, too, had been noticed by one of our anonymous reviewers.

  11. 11.

    One of our anonymous reviewers has made such a remark. The list operators used in the example of above can be found in [14, Sect. 9.3].

  12. 12.

    The relevant assertions on this topic can be found ‘scattered’ across [14, Rule 5.1, Rule 5.2, Definition 14, Definition 17, Definition 27, Definition 30 in Chap. 5 and Chap. 17].

  13. 13.

    For comparison see the concept of ‘Value-Space-based Sub-Typing’ [22].

  14. 14.

    During the historic evolution of SOFL, those object-oriented features were simply ‘plugged onto’ the already existing older functional features, thus ‘cluttering’ the entire language with much redundancy.

  15. 15.

    One of our anonymous reviewers had made a comment on this point.

  16. 16.

    Strictly speaking we have thus an ‘SFL’ dialect without the Object-oriented ‘O’.

  17. 17.

    Shortage of page-space in this paper does not allow us to illustrate the very dense description of above with a picture; the full explanation will appear in [2].

  18. 18.

    One of our anonymous reviewers had made such a remark.

  19. 19.

    Please see Fig. 2 again for the ‘general overview’. The method of generating the \(\mu \)-Calculus formulæ cannot be explained in this paper due to shortage of page-space; please see [2] for the details.

  20. 20.

    Intel i7-6700 CPU.

  21. 21.

    ‘Processes’ in SOFL may be considered as ‘functions plus side-effects’, in contrast to the ‘pure’ functions that SOFL also allows to be specified [14, Sect. 4.17].

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Acknowledgements

During the course of our project several discussions with the following experts were especially helpful: Shaoying Liu, Markus Roggenbach, Jan Friso Groote, Stefan Blom, Jaco v.d. Pol, and Christian Dietrich. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on our paper’s draft before the SOFL\(+\)MSVL‘18 workshop, and we also acknowledge the interesting discussion contributions by various participants of the workshop following our paper’s presentation in Australia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

    Johan van der Berg & Stefan Gruner

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  1. Johan van der Berg
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  2. Stefan Gruner
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Correspondence to Stefan Gruner .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Xidian University, Xi’an, China

    Zhenhua Duan

  2. Hosei University, Tokyo, Japan

    Shaoying Liu

  3. Xidian University, Xi’an, China

    Cong Tian

  4. Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan

    Fumiko Nagoya

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van der Berg, J., Gruner, S. (2019). Formal Semantics and Tool Support for a Syntactically Restricted Dialect of SOFL. In: Duan, Z., Liu, S., Tian, C., Nagoya, F. (eds) Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language and Method. SOFL+MSVL 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11392. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13651-2_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13651-2_8

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