Transformation of Applicative Specifications into Imperative ...

Chapter 8
Specifications
This chapter describes the different RSL specifications made during the
project. Not every specification is fully described. The purpose of the chapter
is to give a good understanding of the specifications by describing the
overall structures of the specifications and by showing representative snippets
of the specifications.
The transformer is developed using the RSL2Java tool, which can translate
a subset RSL1 of RSL into Java. This RSL2Java tool is further described
in Chapter 9.
8.1 Overview of the Different Specifications
The main functionality of the transformer is the transformation from abstract
syntax tree representation, AST, of an applicative specification into abstract
syntax tree representation of a corresponding imperative specification, if the
transformation is possible.
In order to formally specify this transformation two specifications are
necessary:
1. A specification of the RSL AST, which is described in Section 8.2.
2. A specification of the transformation, which is described in Section 8.3.
In order to develop the actual transformer the RSL2Java tool is used to
generate an executable Java program from the specifications. In order to be
able to translate the specifications into Java using the RSL2Java tool, the
specifications have to be written within RSL1. The specification of the RSL
AST is written within RSL1, but the specification of the transformation is
written within RSL. This means that the specification of the transformation
has to be rewritten such that it is within the RSL1 subset. A description
of how the transformer specification is translated into RSL1 can be found in
Section 8.4.
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