XASM- An Extensible, Component-Based Abstract State Machines Language

The Abstract State Machine (ASM) [16] approach has already proven to be suitable for large-scale specifications of realistic systems [18,9,22,34]. Due to the fact that the ASM approach defines a notion of executing specifications, it provides a perfect basis for a language, which can be used as a specification language as well as a high-level programming language. However, in order to upgrade to a realistic programming language, such a language must — besides other features — add a modularization concept to the core ASM constructs in order to provide the possibility to structure large-scale ASM-formalizations and to flexibly define reusable specification units. In this paper, the language Xasm, which stands for Extensible ASM, is presented. Xasm realizes a component-based modularization concept based on the notion of external functions as defined in ASMs. This paper also briefly describes the support environment of Xasm consisting of the Xasm-compiler translating Xasm programs to C source code, and the graphical debugging and animation tool.