Introduction and misc ideas

[Alexis Read]

On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Cyril Hansen wrote:

> I looked at Maude and Project Tatami. These project are possibly the
> "right way" to
> fulfill our requirements - I just don't have the necessary background to
> judge them -
>
> I don't know much in the domain of therorem prover (like INRIA's coq) -
> but my impression
> was that these systems are still weak and limited and not ready for
> industrial use - but I may be wrong. Additionnaly a strong, formal
> mathemathical culture is required to work with them - wich contradicts
> my idea of a simple unified system accessible to a large number of
> developpers.

VHDL is incredibly easy to learn - its not a theorem proving language so
the math background is not mandatory. VHDL is just used for modelling
circuits - chip designing. Remember you don't HAVE to use the theorem
proving elements of Maude, then its like using an ADT specification and
again, quite understandable to most programmers.

COQ works very differently to Maude, Maude seems more scalable. eg.
recent publications at: http://www.csl.sri.com/programs/rewriting/

Pathway Logic: Symbolic Analysis of Biological Signaling

Maude versus Haskell: an Experimental Comparison in Security Protocol
Analysis

Mobile Maude has applications in ubiquitous and grid computing, P2P, B2B
etc.

>
> But at one point the environment itself need to be bootstrapped: A
> language will have to be choosen for this bootstrap. This question may
> become hided completely If we find a good existing environment to start
> from, like Netbeans, ArgoUML, etc..
>
> >But  I think  it would  be better  to try  to be  language independant
> >early.
> >
> >What  about having something  like Objecteering  of Softeam  where you
> >model  the  programs in  a  high level  language,  and  have the  tool
> >generate the code, the documentation,  whatever, for you.  One can add
> >his own methods to generate code or modify the models automatically.

All of these environments 'compile' down to a base language, and are
designed around that particular language - UML in the case of argoUML. The
language needs to come first as far as I can see. Thats not to say I don't
think about great ideas for IDEs and so on, but foundations first!

>
>
> I had a limited experience with previous versions of Together/J and Rational Rose.
> These products may have made progress but at that time (99') I had been disappointed by
> the level of functionnaly and (lack of) usability. IHMO these tools are probably useful
> to manage the complexity of large project in rich companies but they don't make sense when
> ressources are limited. And technically, round trip engineering
> basically does not work. How is it going these days... ?

No idea, if the language is good then the tools should be reasonable at
least though.

>
> And more importantly, they are not free. In the Free world, there is ArgoUML. It is a very
> interesting project, but the same points applies to it.

Open source is essential, yes.

>
> Regards,
>
> Cyril Hansen
>
Alexis.

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