11 Tools

Abstract

This chapter gives an overview of the Casl tools. Analysis tools for Casl like parsers and static checkers, as well as formatters, are stable now and cover the whole of Casl. Proof tools are available but are less mature.

Casl has been designed with the goal of subsuming many previous specification languages. Most of these languages come with specific tools, and of course, these tools should be reusable in the context of Casl. Hence, a central issue is to build bridges to existing tools (rather than building new tools from scratch). Using an interchange format generated by the analysis tools, Casl has been interfaced in this way to rewriting engines and theorem provers, usually working for a subset of Casl.

Naturally, due to the ongoing development of these tools, detailed descriptions would become outdated sooner or later. Therefore, we give here just an appetizer, intended to encourage the reader to install the tools and experiment with them (and to convince her/him that this is rather easy). More detailed descriptions of the tools, as well as their latest versions and other tools that may be developed in the future, are available by following the links on the CoFI tools home page [21]: http://www.cofi.info/Tools.

The analysis tools for Casl have been used to check all the examples contained in this book, as well as the Casl Basic Libraries [20]. Moreover, some proofs from a case study in refinement have been carried out with the proof tools.