Model-Based Development: Applications

Chapter 18. Abstract Action Languages

I have often wished that there were a language in which it would be impossible to tell a lie.

—G. C. Lichtenberg

We have spent most of this book discussing static structure. Even the chapters on FSMs were primarily about using state machine transitions to capture problem space sequencing rules in static structure. Eventually, though, we need to describe what the software does. An AAL describes what a behavior responsibility does within an individual state machine action.

The AALs are text based and superficially look a lot like 3GLs, because what they describe is primarily algorithmic and is expressed in terms of algorithmic computation. That is, the business rules that are left over after capturing as ...