Net Meeting 44

Review of Action List

• 38/2 (strategic research agenda - jsf/mv) : carried forward
• 39/1 (define type inference - pgl/nb) : carried forward
• 41/1 (notes on deploying vdm - pgl/mv/jsf/nb) : carried forward
• 43/1 (organise NM after astgen delivery - pgl/kl/mv/ar) : carried forward

VDMTools

See detailed report of Shin Sahara (sent to the overture-core mailing list) on the latest and greatest on VDMTools from Japan. Experimental additions have been made to the notation to support “any”-type pattern (denoted with a question mark) and some major companies in Japan have showed (renewed) interest in VDM for commercial applications.

Overture

IDE

Kenneth and Augusto have removed the dependency from the Eclipse DLTK components and this is now available in the 0.2.1 release of the Overture tool. Everyone is asked to start testing this release and provide feedback and submit bugreports (if any). There still exists a synchronisation problem in the handling of concurrent tasks in the VDMJ interpreter for the RT extensions. The root cause has not yet been determined.

ASTGEN

Marcel has released a stable version of treegen (used to be called astgen) that should implement our requirements with respect to strict decoupling of the plug-ins that manipulate the parsed syntax tree. Next steps are to move the treegen tool to the maven build structure (action by marcel) and then start work on changing the parser. Decision was taken to drop the lex/yacc based Overture parser and continue work on the VDMJ recursive descent parser and retrofit treegen in there. This work will be done by Kenneth and Augusto, with help from Marcel (treegen) and Nick (vdmj) when required. The aim is to split up VDMJ into seperate components for parsing, type-checking and interpreting.

LANGUAGE BOARD

The minutes of the language board were briefly discussed. New action 44/1 was raised to initiate a dicussion on how to structure and coordinate the development of the language semantics. The status of the upcoming Overture workshop on semantics (13 september at London) was briefly discussed and is being prepared by Sune, Ken Pierce and Nico.

Publication plans

See Planned Publications (page has been updated). The Japanese translation of the Validated Designs book is due very soon.

Any Other Business

Kenneth announces that they have investigated moving the Overture web-site and wiki from twiki to drupal and mediawiki for better security and structuring.

Next Meeting

Next meeting is due on Sunday 25 July, 13h00 CET.