Edinburgh meeting

[Helene.Kirchner@loria.fr]

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     DRAFT of COFI-Tools Aims and Scope

     Deadline for comments: Friday 6 December

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The Common Framework Initiative for Algebraic Specifications is a
collaborative effort involving many different groups working on
algebraic specifications.  The common language CASL is a
general-purpose specification language from which a family of related
specification languages can be obtained by syntactic or semantic
restriction, or by extension (for instance to higher-order functions),
all with a consistent, user-friendly syntax and clear semantics.  To
be usable in research and industrial contexts, such specification
language, sub-languages and extensions must be supported by tools.

The aims and scope of the CoFI-Tools task group are 

- to provide a minimal but widely available set of tools for CASL,
including syntax and static semantics checkers, library support,
emacs and LaTex modes.

- to take advantage of and to reuse an abundance of existing tools
developed in the community for protyping, testing, checking properties
of programs, verifying the correctness of a specification or of a
refinement step.  Many of them are specialized, that is only
applicable to a particular sub-language and its associated logics, and
this raises the practical problem of defining interchange formats and
means of exchanging libraries of specifications.

- ultimately to achieve a coherent and efficient integration 
of sub-languages and related tools. This raises the issue of 
combining and embedding different logics.