A new approach to prototyping Ada-based hardware/software systems

ABSTRACT

Prototyping is not a single technique, but rather a collection of widely diverse activities, with highly fragmented support technology. TRW and Stanford have recently collaborated to develop an approach for reducing this fragmentation in the future. This approach is particularly supportive of the development of large distributed systems in Ada. It is based upon the design of a prototyping language and system which we are tentatively calling Reality. The Reality language is a departure from “normal” programming languages, but bears similarities in form and concepts to standard languages Ada and VHDL. In fact, it can be viewed as both an executable design language for distributed Ada systems and a Module Interconnection Language for pre-existing Ada components. The Reality language and system are being designed to support multiple prototyping strategies including (i) evolutionary development based on successive refinements of abstract models, (ii) bottom-up approaches based on using, for example, preexisting Ada components in prototypes of full Ada systems, and (iii) various hybrid approaches.

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