Comparison of Object-Oriented Formal Methods
Nicolas Guelfi, Olivier Biberstein, Didier Buchs, E. Canver, Marie-Claude Gaudel, Friedrich W. von Henke, D. Schwier · 1997
this document is the classification and comparison of object-oriented formalisms for assessing their suitability within DeVa. Numerous object-oriented formal specification languages are under development, either extending existing formal approaches or formalizing informal OO-methods. It is difficult to evaluate and compare them; a suitable evaluation framework identifying a set of classification criteria needs to be designed for this purpose. In this paper we present a comparative study of various OO-formalisms by means of an evaluation framework. The criteria we have chosen to describe features present or absent in a formalism. One of the challenging parts of this work has been the precise definition of the classification criteria. The conclusions are drawn by relating the results of the classification and comparison to the needs of DeVa. This comparative study also shows that the term "OO formal approach" is used for quite different approaches. 2 Introduction to Object-Oriented Specification Formalisms The natural idea behind the object-oriented paradigm is to consider the system we want to model, simulate or develop, as a collection of active objects which collaborate with each other. The term active object denotes an autonomous entity equipped with its own behavior and some internal data. These local data correspond to the state of the object and of course may change during its lifetime. The only way of interacting with an object is to send it a message (asynchronous) or to request a rendezvous (synchronous). A message is a request for the receiver to give a service to the sender. The sender is also called a client while the receiver may be called a