From: Jurgen Vinju
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Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 13:09:52 +0100
Subject: PEM: Erik Saaman (RUG) | Another Formal Specification Language | 29.01.98

 
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Subject: PEM meeting | 29.01.98 | F013, UvA WINS 
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   Hi Environmentalists,

   This week, Erik Saaman will come down from Groningen to talk about the
   work he is doing there.

   This announcement can be found at <http://www.cwi.nl/~pem>

                   Another Formal Specification Language

   Date:    29.01.98
   Time:    10:00
   Venue:   F013, UvA WINS
   Speaker: Erik Saaman (RUG)
   Title:   Another Formal Specification Language

   Erik  will talk about the work he is doing for his Ph.D. thesis on the
   specification language AFSL. More specifically...

   "As  part  of  my PhD research I designed a small formal specification
   language  called  AFSL (Almost Formal Specification Language). AFSL is
   basically first-order predicate logic with:
     * typing mechanism with subtyping and inheritance;
     * liberal overloading;
     * template-like module mechanism;
     * indexed names, these names with module parameters as "indexes" are
       used as poor mans second-order functions;
     * informal terms, these are terms that contain natural language;
     * monadic  type-constructors,  we  use monads in a similar way as is
       proposed for functional programming;
     * predicates as boolean-valued functions.

   "I will give an overview of the language, its (possible) applications,
   the  implementation  of the type-checker, and some problems concerning
   the  formal  definition  of  the  language.  A  few years ago I gave a
   presentation of an early version of AFSL for the ASF+SDF group.

   "Designing a new language was not the original goal of my PhD research
   project.  It  was  aimed at object-oriented methods for specification.
   However, once we started using our own private semi-formal notation in
   case  studies  we soon decided to make this into a well defined formal
   language with its own tools. This turned out to be much more work then
   expected  (I  know, you could have told me that in advance) and now it
   is  the  main  topic  of  my  research  project.  I am at the point of
   rounding  up this project and writing a thesis. A problem with this is
   that  formal  specification  is  not  a research topic any more in our
   department,  I  am  the  only  one  working on it. I am hoping to find
   another group I can team up with. This presentation is meant to see if
   there  are  enough connections between my work and that of the ASF+SDF
   group to come to some form collaboration."
     _________________________________________________________________

   The  programming environment meetings are a forum for the presentation
   and  discussion  of  new  ideas,  ongoing and finished work. A typical
   meeting  addresses  a subject in the area of programming environments,
   program  generation, algebraic specification, term rewriting, parsing,
   etc.  A presentation ideally takes between 45 and 90 minutes. Meetings
   taking  longer  than 45 minutes are interrupted by a coffeebreak. Most
   Thursdays,  a  meeting is held which starts at 10:00 am. in one of the
   rooms at CWI/WINS. Exceptionally, dates or times may change.

   The    program    of    the    meetings    is    available   on   WWW:
   http://www.cwi.nl/~pem
     _________________________________________________________________