An Adaptive Framework for the Design of Software Specification Languages

Software specifications may be viewed as theories elaborated for application domains. A useful strategy for building specifications is the incremental extension of an initial theory, in which increments add new terms and notions not considered in previous extensions. Given an increment, the corresponding theory is stated in a corresponding specification language. The next increment – or extension of the theory – typically requires a related language extension. Adaptive devices naturally support such scheme, whose instances should reflect the impact of extension variations on the specification language. This paper describes an adaptive framework for the design of a class of software specification languages supporting the incremental process of elaborating software specifications.