General Operations on Module Specifications

Abstract

In chapter 3 we have introduced composition, union, and actualization as basic operations on module specifications and studied their properties. In fact, there are several other operations which are useful for construction and interconnection of module specifications. Perhaps some of them are even more basic than the ones we have studied up to now. Actually the choice of suitable basic operations may depend on the specific kind of specification language which is used for particular applications. From the mathematical point of view it might be interesting to find a set of fundamental operations such that all other operations can be constructed from the fundamental ones. Unfortunately, we don’t have such fundamental operations up to now because a general theory of operations on module specifications is not yet available. In the first two sections of this chapter, however, we start with some general notions which might be useful for such a theory.