An Interactive Specification Environment for Stream-Oriented Processing.

Kei Karasawa, Koso Murakami, Makoto Iwata, Hiroaki Terada: An Interactive Specification Environment for Stream-Oriented Processing CSIT 1999 : 18-27

Abstract

Diagrammatic representations are commonly employed in most of the system function specifications, because it is important to intuitively comprehend the structure and functionality of the system. By using diagrams, a user can naturally specify parallelism without intention. In current software development environment, however, programmers are usually forced to rewrite these specifications into parallel and distributed program codes having totally different structure by using a sequential-assignment-based language. Further, these sequentialized codes must be restructured again by parallelizing compilers to execute the codes in parallel. If essential structural features represented in original diagrammatic specifications were to be directly inherited into resultant executable parallel programs, system engineers could develop and maintain the target systems by describing and modifying only highly understandable diagrammatic specifications. This paper proposes an interactive transformation scheme of the specifications whereby the system engineers can gradually refine diagrammatic specifications. In this paper, the scheme proposed is described with special emphasis on its application to stream-oriented processing in which diagrammatic specifications are most effective. By utilizing the feature of partial interpretation of diagrams, the scheme consists of these three methods, one-to-one interpretation, partial verification of reachability and direct feedback of the result. Finally, practicability of the methodology is illustrated by describing the behavior of each function through a design process of a geometric calculation for computer graphics.

Copyright © 1999 by the Institute for Contemporary Education "JurInfoR-MSU". Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the CSIT copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Institute for Contemporary Education JMSUICE. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the JMSUICE.

Printed Edition

Ch. Freytag and V. Wolfengagen (Eds.): CSIT'99, Proceedings of 1st International Workshop on Computer Science and Information Technologies, January 18-22, 1999, Moscow, Russia. MEPhI Publishing 1999, ISBN 5-7262-0263-5

Electronic Edition