The goals of are CoFI WG are: to coordinate the completion of and disseminate the Common Framework; to demonstrate its practical applicability in industrial contexts; and to establish the infrastructure needed for future European collaborative research in algebraic techniques. We describe progress and activities in the first year of the project, 1 October 1998 -- 30 September 1999. 1 Progress Work in CoFI WG is carried out under six Task Groups. Progress and activities is each of these areas are described in the following subsections. 1.1 Language Design Casl version 1.0 has now been completed [25, 27]. Minor polishing of the design in the past year has not concerned the language proper but syntactic extensions for literals, some syntactic annotations concerning parsing and precedence of (mixfix) operator and predicate symbols, and semantic annotations for proof obligations arising from various kinds of conservative extensions [60]. Polishing the design has benefitted greatly ...

The paper presents a new way to model partial operations by use of nondeterminism: a partial operation is modeled as a nondeterministic operation returning, possibly, any value of the carrier. We introduce an institution of multialgebras MA (modelling nondeterministic operations by set-valued functions) and illustrate the flexibility of our approach by examples showing uniform treatment of strictness, non-strictness and various error handling. We present a methodology for specification development from an abstract specification to low level error handling. We also study the conditions for MA specifications to ensure the existence of initial models. Finally we relate MA to other institutions, in particular, we show embedding of partial algebras and membership algebras into MA. Applying institution transformation instead of embedding leads to the possibility of resuing partial algebra specifications in the proposed framework -- a partial algebra specification can be conservatively (prese...

We recall basic facts about the institution of multialgebras, and introduce a new, quantifier-free reasoning system for deriving consequences of multialgebraic specifications. We then show how can be used for combining specifications developed in other algebraic frameworks. We spell out the definitions of embeddings of institution of partial algebras, and membership algebras, MA.