Object-Oriented Design and Specification.

Abstract

Abstract : This final report summarizes the research performed for the Office of Naval Research under Contract N00014-90-C-0086 on the topic Object-Oriented Design and Specification. The project began on 1 January 1990 and ended on 31 December 1994. Dr. Jose Meseguer was the project leader. Drs. Patrick Lincoln, and Narciso Martf-Oliet and Mr. Timothy Winkler also worked on the project. Early in the project, an important breakthrough took place with the discovery of rewriting logic, which was then further developed 25, 23, 26. Rewriting logic has proved to be a very flexible multiparadigm logic 27 of great simplicity allowing the unification of equational programming, Horn logic programming, object-oriented programming, and concurrent programming. In particular, a very simple semantics can be given in rewriting logic to concurrent object-oriented programming 24, 29, 28 and to object- oriented databases 33. This is particularly encouraging given that concurrent object-oriented programming and object-oriented databases are disciplines generally considered to lack a precise semantics . Encouraged by these results, a preliminary language design for Maude, a wide-spectrum multiparadigm language based on rewriting logic and containing a subset called Simple Maude that can be efficiently compiled onto a wide variety of parallel machines has been developed 34, 27, 30, 28, 17; and very encouraging experience about its suitability for specifying concurrent systems, AI problems, programming languages, and logics has been gathered 30, 20, 21, 32, 22. In addition, some initial progress has been made on transformation and compilation techniques for the Simple Maude parallel programming sublanguage 17,18.