sugar for ocl -凯发官网入口

sugar for ocljörn guy süßinformation technology and electrical engineeringthe university of queensland, st. lucia, 4072, australiajgsuess@itee.uq.edu.auabstract. examples of ocl use often do not exceed a few lines. largerexamples are rare, because the concrete syntax of ocl is verbose andbased exclusively on ascii encoding. this makes it easy to edit oclin any environment, but hard to layout in a readable manner. a minorissue like presentation af f ects use in a major way. this paper proposesthree shorthand notations, or syntactic sugars, for laying out ocl inthe latex, html, and unicode encoding systems. to avoid splittingthe available ocl source code base any further, f l avours are convertiblevia the base syntax. to allow benef i t across the community, the repre-sentations are ocl version-independent. to support recognisability, therepresentations are visually very similar. to simplify reuse, def i nitionsare based on posix regular expressions and unicode.1 introductionwhile ocl today of f ers an substantial number of tools, its adoption as an indus-try standard is still limited. usage issues due to language semantics and tooling,like the lack of modularisation, non-deterministic evaluation, the missing and in-suf f i ciently formalized transitive closure operation and collection f l attening havebeen addressed successfully in the past[2,?] and seem to consolidate. ocl’s con-crete syntax still seems to be an impediment:working with a un-cefact group on the metamodel for the business lan-guage umm[8], which is formalized as a uml prof i le, i had to introduce theworkgroup to the use of ocl. it turned out that even simple examples quicklyf i lled the whiteboard. points of emphasis were hard to make, due to the expansivesyntax. thus i resorted to short symbols, borrowed from math, logic or impro-vised in the process, but made clear that these were not standard compliant.after collecting the workshop notes, i found that most participants had adoptedthe shortened ad-hoc syntax and that those that had used it, had generally triedout more and dif f erent formalisation solutions, and hence come up with betterones on average, then those that had used the standard syntax.after this experience, i applied the shorthand to the ocl contained in mywork of creating a uml prof i le for small-scale enterprise integration, to saveprint space. section 4 shows two well-formedness rules from the uml 1.4.2