Beyond Ada - generating Ada code from equational specifications

Technical Report · Thu Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 1987

OSTI ID:7184071

Szymanski, B K

Real-time mission-oriented embedded systems are much more difficult to design than ordinary software systems. They require highly reliable and efficient implementations to satisfy mission and time constraints imposed by the applications. The Ada language was designed to facilitate real-time-system software development. However, for many programmers the size and complexity of Ada itself are of concern. In the assertive programming paradigm, computations are specified as sets of assertions about properties of the solution, and not as a sequence of procedural steps. Solving procedures are automatically generated from the assertive description. Real-time programming for mission-oriented systems is supported by equational languages in which assertions are expressed as algebraic equations. Programs written in equational languages are concise, free from implementation details, and easily amenable to verification and parallel processing. The level of programming expertise required to program in an equational language is much lower than the level that is needed by Ada programmers. This paper describes an implementation of an equational-language system that generates highly efficient distributed code in Ada. It also demonstrates how the equational-language system can be used in real-time software development.

• Research Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst., Troy, NY (USA). Dept. of Computer Science
• OSTI ID: 7184071
• Report Number(s): AD-A-191866/3/XAB
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990210* -- Supercomputers-- (1987-1989)
ALGEBRA
DISTRIBUTION
EFFICIENCY
EQUATIONS
MATHEMATICS
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PROGRAMMING
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
REAL TIME SYSTEMS