Editorial: Where Theory and Practice Meet

Abstract

The idea for compiling a special issue on the topic of Semantic Foundations of Engineering Design Languages originates from a workshop on the same topic, which was held in conjunction with ETAPS 2002 in Grenoble, France, and was organised by G. Luttgen, F. Maraninchi and M. Mendler. This successful workshop explored the interaction between theory and application of formal methods as they meet in the semantics of design and specification languages for embedded systems that are employed in engineering practice today. It was felt that the exciting developments taking place in this area deserve to be documented for a wider audience. Engineering design languages, in contrast to general-purpose programming languages, are typically domainspecific and enforce well-defined and uniform design styles. This makes the use of these languages sufficiently restricted to reap the benefits of formal semantics at the tool level rather than in the well-known fashion of individual modelling case studies. At the same time, these languages are no longer, or have never been, academic toys but have industrial-strength applications. This calls for professional support in formal validation, incremental code generation or component models, which can only be based on rigorous formal semantics. Yet, traditionally, there has been a gap. It arises in industrial practice when the development of such languages is mainly driven by pragmatic considerations that sacrifice semantic coherence for a rich combination of features. It also arises in academic research when it is exclusively carried out in the framework of abstract calculi and logics that lack practical relevance. This gap is beginning to close. This special issue reports on several recent trends in the semantics of engineering design languages that aim at making theory and practice more relevant to each other. It includes six peer-reviewed articles, which are naturally structured here into two tracks: