This section sketches the plans for the immediate future of the Common Framework Initiative. Up-to-date information may be found via the CoFI WWW pages [Mos97].
The tentative design of CASL will be revised, if necessary, on the basis of its investigation by the various CoFI task groups.The main responsibility here is on the Semantics task group, which is currently making a critical review of the informal explanation of the intended semantics in the existing CASL language summary, and contemplating what semantic entities would be needed for a formal semantics. This should reveal any ambiguities and incompletenesses in the informal explanation, as well as providing grounds for belief in the existence of a reasonable semantic model for the combined CASL constructs.
Other task groups are active as well: the Language Design task group is to test the tentative CASL design by expressing standard examples in CASL--it is also considering the issue of restrictions and extensions of CASL, for instance to check that a higher-order extension could be provided without undue difficulty; the Methodology task group is considering the development of implementations from CASL specifications; and the Tools task group is working on the issue of interfacing CASL with existing specification languages and tools, as well as clarifying what basic tools for CASL will need to be implemented.
The revised design, together with proposals for concrete syntax and tool support, will be submitted to a meeting of IFIP WG 1.3 in June 1997.Any problems with the tentative CASL design should have been discovered and rectified before the revised design proposal is submitted. It is hoped that several alternative proposals for concrete syntax, with illustrative examples, will have been made by then; whether it will be so easy to reach agreement on just one proposal is perhaps not so clear at present.
A lot of work remains to be done...The approval of a CASL design will be just the start of the main CoFI work: progressing from ideas to their realization in documentation, methodology, and tools. Although CoFI has already come quite a long way on the basis of voluntary effort and local support at various sites, and the expected redirection of future development towards languages and tools based on CASL should provide further resources, international funding for CoFI will be needed to allow the realization of its full potential for industrial applications.