[mercury-users] Possum

Dan Hazel d.hazel at mailbox.uq.edu.au
Mon Sep 20 13:50:46 AEST 1999


Something else for
    http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/research/mercury/applications.html
perhaps?
Possum's backend contains about 35000 lines of Mercury.

It's a Z interpreter which does its goal reordering in the fly 
(rather than translating Z to Mercury for example).
The pros and cons to this approach will be obvious to most here.

The Linux version is the one transparently available on the pages
below.  The Solaris version is available on request - or just by
looking a little harder.  This is because the Solaris version is
much much slower.  Any ideas as to why this might be (without 
having seen the code :-) ?

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Possum 1.0 has been released.
It is available for free download for non-commercial use from
 
    http://svrc.it.uq.edu.au/Possum/
    (just go to the distribution section)

in the hope that it will be of use to users of the Z notation.
Visitors to FM'99 might find an SVRC gentleman playing with Possum.

Big troubles, complaints, chit-chat?  
Dan Hazel <odin at svrc.uq.edu.au>

Feature request and bug fix releases will be made available at
the above site as frequently as required.

Dan

======================================================================
Possum is a interpreter/enumerator/executor/animator of structures
specified using the Z notation.  It can be used to test arbitrary Z
expressions and predicates or to step through consecutive states of
a state machine by `executing' the operations of that machine.

Possum also provides a simple protocol to allow interaction abstracted
from the language of Z with a design specified in Z.  A requirements
engineer, a client or a supervisor to whom the functionality of a
specification is demonstrated, need not be intimately familiar with
the specification nor even be familiar with the Z notation.

It is of great assistance as a Z teaching aid allowing students to 
investigate the functionality of the Z toolkit operators and the 
subtleties of their formal specifications.
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