Compiling Abstract State Machines to C++ (Extended Abstract)

Abstract State Machines (ASMs) [Gur95] have been widely used to specify software and hardware systems. Only a few of these specifications are executable, although there are several interpreters and some compilers for ASMs. At Siemens Corporate Technology a part of the FALKO project [BPS00] was designed with ASMs. The specification for that part was written in ASM-SL [Cas99] which can be interpreted by the ASM Workbench [Cas00]. The Workbench was useful to debug the specification, but too slow for full test cases of FALKO. The question arose whether the code for the final product release had to be coded by hand or if it was possible to generate the C++ code from the specification automatically. For an automatic code generation, the following constraints had to be fulfilled by a compiler: 1. The specification was already written in ASM-SL and the compiler should use the same input for code generation. Otherwise the specification would have to be rewritten in a different syntax, maybe with a slightly different semantics