Formal languages let us define the textual representation of data with precision. Formal grammars, typically in the form of BNF-like productions, describe the language syntax, which is then annotated for syntax-directed translation and completed with semantic actions. When, apart from the textual representation of data, an explicit representation of the corresponding data structure is required, the language designer has to devise the mapping between the suitable data model and its proper language specification, and then develop the conversion procedure from the parse tree to the data model instance. Unfortunately, whenever the format of the textual representation has to be modified, changes have to propagated throughout the entire language processor tool chain. These updates are time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone. Besides, in case different applications use the same language, several copies of the same language specification have to be maintained. In this paper, we introduce a model-based parser generator that decouples language specification from language processing, hence avoiding many of the problems caused by grammar-driven parsers and parser generators.
Context and motivation: Usage of Formal Specification languages is scarce in web application development as compared to safety critical/hardware systems. Question/problem: An apt formal specification language should provide the following features: Firstly, it should have well-defined semantics, so that specifications written in it can not be inherently ambiguous. Secondly, it should have tool support for automatic detection of specification bugs. Additionally, for domains like web development, it is important that specification formalisms build over familiar notations, as the benefits of learn…
In large-scale embedded system development, requirement and test specifications are often expressed in natural language. In the context of developing such products, requirement review is performed in many cases manually using these specifications as a basis for quality assurance. Low-quality specifications can have expensive consequences during the requirement engineering process. Especially, if feedback loops during requirement engineering are long, leading to artifacts that are not easily maintainable, are hard to understand, and are inefficient to port to other system variants. We use the i…
Formal specification is a basis for rigorous software implementation. VDM-SL is a formal specification language with an extensive executable subset. Successful cases of VDM-family including VDM-SL have shown that producing a well-tested executable specification can reduce the cost of the implementation phase. This paper introduces and discusses the reversed order of specification and implementation. The development of a multi-agent simulation language called \remobidyc is described and examined as a case study of defining a formal specification after initial implementation and reflecting the s…
Spectra is a new specification language for reactive systems, specifically tailored for the context of reactive synthesis. The meaning of Spectra is defined by a translation to a kernel language. Spectra comes with the Spectra Tools, a set of analyses, including a synthesizer to obtain a correct-by-construction implementation, several means for executing the resulting controller, and additional analyses aimed at helping engineers write higher-quality specifications. We present the language and give an overview of the tool set.
Object-Z is an object-oriented specification language which extends the Z language with classes, objects, inheritance and polymorphism that can be used to represent the specification of a complex system as collections of objects. There are a number of existing works that mapped Object-Z to C++ and Java programming languages. Since Python and Object-Z share many similarities, both are object-oriented paradigm, support set theory and predicate calculus moreover, Python is a functional programming language which is naturally closer to formal specifications, we propose a mapping from Object-Z spec…
BeSpaceD: Towards a Tool Framework and Methodology for the Specification and Verification of Spatial Behavior of Distributed Software Component Systems
The Language Server Protocol (LSP) changed the field of Integrated Development Environments(IDEs), as it decouples core (programming) language features functionality from editor smarts, thus lowering the effort required to extend an IDE to support a language. The concept is a success and has been adopted by several programming languages and beyond. This is shown by the emergence of several LSP implementations for the many programming and specification languages (languages with a focus on modelling, reasoning, or proofs). However, for such languages LSP has been ad-hocly extended with the addit…
The CBS framework supports component-based specification of programming languages. It aims to significantly reduce the effort of formal language specification, and thereby encourage language developers to exploit formal semantics more widely. CBS provides an extensive library of reusable language specification components, facilitating co-evolution of languages and their specifications. After introducing CBS and its formal definition, this short paper reports work in progress on generating an IDE for CBS from the definition. It also considers the possibility of supporting component-based langua…
TextFormats is a software system for efficient and user-friendly creation of text format specifications, accessible from multiple programming languages (C/C++, Python, Nim) and the Unix command line. To work with a format, a specification written in the TextFormats Specification Language (TFSL) must be created. The specification defines datatypes for each part of the format. The syntax for datatype definitions in TextFormats specifications is based on the text representation. Thus this system is well suited for the description of existing formats. However, when creating a new text format for r…
Modern programming follows the continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) approach rather than the traditional waterfall model. Even the development of modern programming languages uses the CI/CD approach to swiftly provide new language features and to adapt to new development environments. Unlike in the conventional approach, in the modern CI/CD approach, a language specification is no more the oracle of the language semantics because both the specification and its implementations can co-evolve. In this setting, both the specification and implementations may have bugs, and gua…
RITA: A Tool for Automated Requirements Classification and Specification from Online User Feedback
Lero, the Research Ireland Centre for Software, University of Limerick（利默里克大学软件研究爱尔兰研究中心）；University College Dublin (UCD)（都柏林大学学院）；University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）
A wide range of interesting program properties are intrinsically relational, i.e., they relate two or more program traces. Two prominent relational properties are secure information flow and conditional program equivalence. By showing the absence of illegal information flow, confidentiality and integrity properties can be proved. Equivalence proofs allow using an existing (trusted) software release as specification for new revisions. Currently, the verification of relational properties is hardly accessible to practitioners due to the lack of appropriate relational specification languages. In p…
We present ShapeIt, a tool for mining specifications of cyber-physical systems (CPS) from their real-valued behaviors. The learned specifications are in the form of linear shape expressions, a declarative formal specification language suitable to express behavioral properties over real-valued signals. A linear shape expression is a regular expression composed of parameterized lines as atomic symbols with symbolic constraints on the line parameters. We present here the architecture of our tool along with the different steps of the specification mining algorithm. We also describe the usage of th…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security（CISPA亥姆霍兹信息安全中心）；Saarland University（萨尔兰大学）
We study the generalization abilities of language models when translating natural language into formal specifications with complex semantics. In particular, we fine-tune language models on three datasets consisting of English sentences and their corresponding formal representation: 1) regular expressions (regex), frequently used in programming and search; 2) First-order logic (FOL), commonly used in software verification and theorem proving; and 3) linear-time temporal logic (LTL), which forms the basis for industrial hardware specification languages. Our experiments show that, in these divers…
The multiplicity of software projects' stakeholders and activities leads to the multiplicity of software specification views and thus creates the need to establish mutual consistency between them. The process of establishing such consistency is error-prone and requires adequate tool support. The present article introduces specogramming - an approach that treats a modern object-oriented integrated development environment as a word processor. The approach turns the process of documenting initial specifications into a simplified form of programming and turns structured-natural-language specificat…
In model-driven engineering (MDE), UML class diagrams serve as a way to plan and communicate between developers. However, it is complex and resource-consuming. We propose an automated approach for the extraction of UML class diagrams from natural language software specifications. To develop our approach, we create a dataset of UML class diagrams and their English specifications with the help of volunteers. Our approach is a pipeline of steps consisting of the segmentation of the input into sentences, the classification of the sentences, the generation of UML class diagram fragments from senten…
