The Abstract State Machine (ASM) [
15] approach has
already proven to be suitable for large-scale specifications of
realistic systems [
17,
8,
20,
33].
Due to the fact that the ASM approach defines a notion of
executing specifications, it provides a perfect basis for a
language, which can be used as a specification language as well as a
high-level programming language. However, in order to upgrade to a
realistic programming language, such a language must - besides
other features - add a modularization concept to the core ASM
constructs in order to provide the possibility to structure
large-scale ASM-formalizations and to flexibly define reusable
specification units. In this paper, the language X
ASM, which stands
for
Extensible ASM, is presented. X
ASM realizes a
component-based modularization concept based on the notion of
external functions as defined in ASMs.
This paper also briefly describes the support
environment of X
ASM consisting of the X
ASM-compiler translating
X
ASM programs to C source code, and the graphical debugging and
animation tool.
