Maude is a high-level language and a high-performance system supporting executable specification and declarative programming in rewriting logic. Since rewriting logic contains equational logic, Maude also supports equational specification and programming in its sublanguage of functional modules and theories. The underlying equational logic chosen for Maude is membership equational logic, that has sorts, subsorts, operator overloading, and partiality definable by membership and equality conditions. Rewriting logic is reflective, in the sense of being able to express its own metalevel at the object level. Reflection is systematically exploited in Maude endowing the language with powerful metaprogramming capabilities, including both user-definable module operations and declarative strategies to guide the deduction process. This paper explains and illustrates with examples the main concepts of Maude's language design, including its underlying logic, functional, system and object-oriented modules, as well as parameterized modules, theories, and views. We also explain how Maude supports reflection, metaprogramming and internal strategies. The paper outlines the principles underlying the Maude system implementation, including its semicompilation techniques. We conclude with some remarks about applications, work on a formal environment for Maude, and a mobile language extension of Maude.

In a similar way as 2-categories can be regarded as a special case of double categories, rewriting logic (in the unconditional case) can be embedded into the more general tile logic, where also side-effects and rewriting synchronization are considered. Since rewriting logic is the semantic basis of several language implementation efforts, it is useful to map tile logic back into rewriting logic in a conservative way, to obtain executable specifications of tile systems. We extend the results of earlier work by two of the authors, focusing on some interesting cases where the mathematical structures representing configurations (i.e., states) and effects (i.e., observable actions) are very similar, in the sense that they have in common some auxiliary structure (e.g., for tupling, projecting, etc.). In particular, we give in full detail the descriptions of two such cases where (net) process-like and usual term structures are employed. Corresponding to these two cases, we introduce two ca...

Rewriting logic expresses an essential equivalence between logic and computation. System states are in bijective correspondence with formulas, and concurrent computations are in bijective correspondence with proofs. Given this equivalence between computation and logic, a rewriting logic axiom of the form t \Gamma! t 0 has two readings. Computationally, it means that a fragment of a system 's state that is an instance of the pattern t can change to the corresponding instance of t 0 concurrently with any other state changes; logically, it just means that we can derive the formula t 0 from the formula t. Rewriting logic is entirely neutral about the structure and properties of the formulas/states t. They are entirely user-definable as an algebraic data type satisfying certain equational axioms. Because of this ecumenical neutrality, rewriting logic has, from a logical viewpoint, good properties as a logical framework, in which many other logics can be naturally represented. And, computationally, it has also good properties as a semantic framework, in which many different system styles and models of concurrent computation and many different languages can be naturally expressed without any distorting encodings. The goal of this paper is to provide a relatively gentle introduction to rewriting logic, and to paint in broad strokes the main research directions that, since its introduction in 1990, have been pursued by a growing number of researchers in Europe, the US, and Japan. Key theoretical developments, as well as the main current applications of rewriting logic as a logical and semantic framework, and the work on formal reasoning to prove properties of specifications are surveyed.

The fact that rewriting logic and Maude are reflective, so that rewriting logic specifications can be manipulated as terms at the metalevel, opens up the possibility of defining an algebra of module composition and transformation operations within the logic. This makes such a module algebra easily modifiable and extensible, enables the implementation of language extensions within Maude, and allows formal reasoning about the module operations themselves. In this paper we discuss in detail the Maude implementation of a specific choice of operations for a module algebra of this type, supporting module operations in the Clear/OBJ tradition as well as the transformation of object-oriented modules into system modules. 1

We show how formal specifications can be integrated into one of the current pragmatic object-oriented software development methods. Jacobson’s “Object-Oriented Software Engineering ” (OOSE) process is combined with object-oriented algebraic specifications by extending object and interaction diagrams with formal annotations. The specifications are based on Meseguer’s rewriting logic and are written in a meta-level extension of the language Maude by process expressions. As a result any such diagram can be associated with a formal specification, proof obligations ensuring invariant properties can be automatically generated, and the refinement relations between documents at different abstraction levels can be formally stated and proved. 1

Tile logic extends rewriting logic, taking into account rewriting with side-effects and rewriting synchronization. Since rewriting logic is the semantic basis of several language implementation efforts, it is interesting to map tile logic back into rewriting logic in a conservative way, to obtain executable specifications of tile systems. The resulting implementation requires a meta-layer to control the rewritings, so that only tile proofs are accepted. However, by exploiting the reflective capabilities of the Maude language, such meta-layer can be specified as a kernel of internal strategies. It turns out that the required strategies are very general and can be reformulated in terms of search algorithms for non-confluent systems equipped with a notion of success. We formalize such strategies, giving their detailed description in Maude, and showing their application to modeling uniform tile systems. 1 Introduction The evolution of a process in a concurrent system often depends on the ...

this paper I briefly sketch recent work on meta-logical foundations that seems promising as a conceptual basis on which to achieve the goal of formal interoperability. Specificaly, I will briefly discuss:

One of the key goals of rewriting logic from its beginning has been to provide a semantic and logical framework in which many models of computation and languages can be naturally represented. There is by now very extensive evidence supporting the claim that rewriting logic is indeed a very flexible and simple logical and semantic framework. From a language design point of view the obvious question to ask is: how can a rewriting logic language best support logical and semantic framework applications, so that it becomes a metalanguage in which a very wide variety of logics and languages can be both semantically defined, and implemented? Our answer is: by being reflective. This paper discusses our latest language design and implementation work on Maude as a reflective metalanguage in which entire environments---including syntax definition, parsing, pretty printing, execution, and input/output---can be defined for a language or logic L of choice. 1

. Tile logic extends rewriting logic by taking into account sideeffects and rewriting synchronization. These aspects are very important when we model process calculi, because they allow us to express the dynamic interaction between processes and "the rest of the world". Since rewriting logic is the semantic basis of several language implementation efforts, an executable specification of tile systems can be obtained by mapping tile logic back into rewriting logic, in a conservative way. However, a correct rewriting implementation of tile logic requires the development of a metalayer to control rewritings, i.e., to discard computations that do not correspond to any deduction in tile logic. We show how such methodology can be applied to term tile systems that cover and extend a wide-class of SOS formats for the specification of process calculi. The well-known case-study of full CCS, where the term tile format is needed to deal with recursion (in the form of the replicator operator), is di...

this paper we show some example of their application to implement concurrent process calculi. In particular, in Section 2 we define executable implementations of CCS-like languages, preserving their original operational semantics. The two case studies considered here are the tile specification of finite CCS given in