Net Meeting 54

Review of Action List

• 38/2 (strategic research agenda - jsf) : carried forward (JSF+PGL to review before next NM)
• 41/1 (video on deploying vdm - pgl/mv/jsf/nb) : carried forward
• 52/1 (propose release plan at the June 2011 Workshop): only discussed informally at the workshop. Action revised to target 1 November.
• 52/2 (publish June 2011 OW as an ASE Tech Report): carried forward

VDMTools

See detailed report from Shin Sahara (sent to the overture-core mailing list) for the latest on VDMTools from Japan. A large number of smaller-scale but very positive engagements. Shin reported the set up of a VDM Working Group as part of the Dependable Software Forum (DSF)

Overture

IDE

See detailed report from Kenneth Lausdahl and August Ribeiro (sent to the overture-core mailing list) for the latest news on the Overture IDE. Since the IDE release only a single change has been made optimizing the update of the navigator.

Language Board

RMs are up in for community discussion. People should actively discuss the outstanding issues.

Action 54/1: LB to place minutes on the Wiki in future.

Release of version 1.1

Agreed to announce this minor release in a “small splash” way to VDM Forum + twitter + all overture users.

AST Restructuring

See detailed report from Kenneth Lausdahl and August Ribeiro (sent to the overture-core mailing list) for the latest news on the AST Restructuring. This has turned out to be a larger task than originally envisaged.

“As you all might know we started the work on creating a new generated AST with visitor support for Overture. So far we have completed the AST definition and implemented changed VDMJ parser to create the new tree. Implemented the type checker so that it can check all but a few of the examples SL models in the same way as VDMJ does it. It can also check the CSK Test suite where only a few models give errors and about 50 models fail, however almost all of the 50 failures are just an offset in the reported location of warnings and errors which is not a big deal to fix.

The derived AST stuff we have been discussing turned out to be a bad idea (We implemented it for the interpreter). Here is what we discussed doing: We have a tree AST1 which has some structure, then we would create a new AST2 which has the same structure but new Java classes with no relation to AST1. This turned out to be a bad idea because e.g. the interpreter would need some functionality already implemented in the type checker e.g. the type comparator. The result of this was re-implementing the same functionality used to do some work based on the AST (In our case this might be quite a lot of code which then would be duplicate classes just taking a different Java class name with the same structure).

We changed most of the interpreter to the new AST (Which is an extended copy of the AST from the Type Checker). Missing are a few places where parsing and TC is done plus the two visitors evaluating the expressions and statements, however this work is relatively easy. The main part missing is that we need to change the AST so that it both extends the type checker AST and allows new stuff to be added. We have a solution for this but is a bit more complicated than the original idea since Java doesn’t have multiple inheritance.”

Publication plans

Please ensure that the Planned Publications page Planned Publications is updated, and that any published papers are available on the Overture wiki Overture Publications

AOB

No other business.

Next Meeting

Next meeting is due on September 18th 2011, 1300 CET