15,803 research outputs found
Specifying Reusable Components
Reusable software components need expressive specifications. This paper
outlines a rigorous foundation to model-based contracts, a method to equip
classes with strong contracts that support accurate design, implementation, and
formal verification of reusable components. Model-based contracts
conservatively extend the classic Design by Contract with a notion of model,
which underpins the precise definitions of such concepts as abstract
equivalence and specification completeness. Experiments applying model-based
contracts to libraries of data structures suggest that the method enables
accurate specification of practical software
Value Types in Eiffel
Identifies a number of problems with Eiffel's expanded types in modelling value types, and proposes a backward compatible syntactic extension, and a modified semantics. The latter is also shown to be (effectively) backward compatible, in the sense that existing programs would run unaffected if compilers implemented the new semantics. The benefits of the approach are discussed, including an elegant approach to rebuilding data structure libraries
Towards Practical Graph-Based Verification for an Object-Oriented Concurrency Model
To harness the power of multi-core and distributed platforms, and to make the
development of concurrent software more accessible to software engineers,
different object-oriented concurrency models such as SCOOP have been proposed.
Despite the practical importance of analysing SCOOP programs, there are
currently no general verification approaches that operate directly on program
code without additional annotations. One reason for this is the multitude of
partially conflicting semantic formalisations for SCOOP (either in theory or
by-implementation). Here, we propose a simple graph transformation system (GTS)
based run-time semantics for SCOOP that grasps the most common features of all
known semantics of the language. This run-time model is implemented in the
state-of-the-art GTS tool GROOVE, which allows us to simulate, analyse, and
verify a subset of SCOOP programs with respect to deadlocks and other
behavioural properties. Besides proposing the first approach to verify SCOOP
programs by automatic translation to GTS, we also highlight our experiences of
applying GTS (and especially GROOVE) for specifying semantics in the form of a
run-time model, which should be transferable to GTS models for other concurrent
languages and libraries.Comment: In Proceedings GaM 2015, arXiv:1504.0244
Logic Programming Applications: What Are the Abstractions and Implementations?
This article presents an overview of applications of logic programming,
classifying them based on the abstractions and implementations of logic
languages that support the applications. The three key abstractions are join,
recursion, and constraint. Their essential implementations are for-loops, fixed
points, and backtracking, respectively. The corresponding kinds of applications
are database queries, inductive analysis, and combinatorial search,
respectively. We also discuss language extensions and programming paradigms,
summarize example application problems by application areas, and touch on
example systems that support variants of the abstractions with different
implementations
Web and Semantic Web Query Languages
A number of techniques have been developed to facilitate
powerful data retrieval on the Web and Semantic Web. Three categories
of Web query languages can be distinguished, according to the format
of the data they can retrieve: XML, RDF and Topic Maps. This article
introduces the spectrum of languages falling into these categories
and summarises their salient aspects. The languages are introduced using
common sample data and query types. Key aspects of the query
languages considered are stressed in a conclusion
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