Abstract

: The composition of modular specifications can be modeled, in a category theoretic framework, by colimits of diagrams. Pushouts in particular describe the combination of two specifications sharing a common part. This work extends this classic idea along three lines. First, we define a term language to represent modular specifications built with colimit constructions over a category of base specifications. This language is formally characterized by a finitely cocomplete category. Then, we propose to associate with each term a diagram. This interpretation provides us with a more abstract representation of modular specifications because irrelevant steps of the construction are eliminated. We define a category of diagrams, which is a completion of the base category with finite colimits. We prove that the interpretation of terms as diagrams defines an equivalence between the corresponding categories, which shows the correctness of this interpretation. At last, we propose an algorithm to no...

Citations