PEARL for Distributed Embedded Systems

This article is meant to highlight Specification PEARL in an object-oriented perspective. Specification PEARL is a specification and description language, which originates from Multiprocessor PEARL (DIN 66253, Part 3), also named PEARL for distributed systems. It extends the standard by allowing the description of asymmetrical distributed architectures as well as by additional parameters for the parameterisation of the RTOS and later feasibility analysis. PEARL itself in its latest implementation still is a procedural language although it supports features like tasking and synchronisation, being supported only by some object oriented languages. Due to the nature of its applications, transferring PEARL into an object-oriented language was not an easy nor straightforward process; hence, there are several implementations of objectoriented PEARL. For Multiprocessor PEARL there was no attempt in this direction so far. In Specification PEARL HW/SW co-design methodology we are striving to use the Specification PEARL language as a specification language with the current release of PEARL (PEARL90). The aim of this article is to give Specification PEARL and its components an object oriented perspective to structure them in a way, which would lead to natural generalisation-specialisation and whole-part relationships and define their interfaces. It will also show why it would be convenient for Specification PEARL to support classes of objects.