Abstract
The advantages of exception handling are well-known and several sequential and parallel programming languages include exception handling mechanisms. Unfortunately, none of the three standardized Formal Description Techniques (Estelle, Lotos, and Sdl) supports exceptions. In 1992, Quemada and Azcorra pointed out the need for structuring protocol descriptions with exceptions and proposed to extend Lotos with a so-called “generalized termination and enabling” mechanism. In this paper, we show that their proposal is not fully appropriate for a compositional description of complex systems. We propose a simpler exception mechanism for Lotos, for which we provide a syntactic and semantic definition. We show that this exception mechanism is very primitive, as it allows several existing Lotos operators to be expressed as special cases. We also suggest additional operators, such as symmetric sequential composition and iteration, which are derived from the exception mechanism.
This work has been supported in part by the European Commission, under project ISN-CAN-65 “EUCALYPTUS-2: An European/Canadian Lotos Protocol Tool Set”
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Garavel, H., Sighireanu, M. (1996). On the Introduction of Exceptions in E-LOTOS. In: Gotzhein, R., Bredereke, J. (eds) Formal Description Techniques IX. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35079-0_30
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