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Assessing the Expressivity of Formal Specification Languages

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 4019))

Abstract

Formal modelling languages are powerful tools to systematically represent and analyze the properties of systems. A myriad of new modelling languages, as well as extensions of existing ones, are proposed every year. We may consider that a modelling language is useful if it allows to represent the critical aspects of systems in an expressive way. In particular, we require that the modelling language allows to accurately discriminate between correct and incorrect behaviors concerning critical aspects of the model. In this paper we present a method to assess the suitability of a modelling language to define systems belonging to a specific domain. Basically, given a system, we consider alternative correct/incorrect systems and we study whether the representations provided by the studied modelling language keep the distinction between correct and incorrect as each alternative system does.

Research partially supported by the Spanish MCYT project TIC2003-07848-C02-01 and the Junta de Castilla-La Mancha project PAC-03-001.

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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López, N., Núñez, M., Rodríguez, I. (2006). Assessing the Expressivity of Formal Specification Languages. In: Johnson, M., Vene, V. (eds) Algebraic Methodology and Software Technology. AMAST 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4019. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11784180_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11784180_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-35633-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-35636-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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