Design and Implementation of an Application Interface for LOTOS Processors

Abstract LOTOS has attracted a lot of attention as a suitable language for formal description techniques, and a number of LOTOS processors have been proposed and implemented, that include specification simulators, test case generators, property checkers, and structural editors. Those varieties of LOTOS processors should ideally be implemented based on a common LOTOS kernel interfaced with a set of well defined interface library functions , the combination of which provides sufficiently powerful functionality for LOTOS system in a very flexible development environment. This approach is particularly advantageous because it yields portable systems. The purpose of this paper is to report our project of designing such a kernel, LIpS (LOTOS Interpretation Server) , and the set of interface functions, which we call service functions of LIpS. We believe that our kernel together with these service functions can implement virtually all LOTOS processors, and therefore serves as a general purpose LOTOS processor development environment. Moreover, the grammar handled by our kernel contains extensions to standard LOTOS that allows separate compilation and treatment of non-determinism.