A Specification Language for Object-Oriented Analysis and Design

This paper introduces and illustrates the use of ObjLog, an algebraic specification language for Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. ObjLog is fully abstract, i.e., it specifies the message-passing and instantiation of objects without explicit use of state. Object behavior is abstractly defined by traces composed of message send and response events, including instantiation requests. ObjLog extends equational algebraic specification techniques to specify these traces and to reason about state dependent transitions in objects. Unlike most existing specification languages, ObjLog is sufficiently expressive to specify the full range of value-based message-passing and instantiation behavior exhibited by sequential object-oriented programming languages. In this paper, ObjLog is used to specify a simple example which is difficult to fully specify using other specification languages. The resulting ObjLog specification is then refined in three different ways: subtyping by extension, specialization, and aggregation.

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