The Power of Rich Syntax for Model-based Development

During the last century, many general purpose programming languages have been developed, all having rigid syntax and often a von-Neuman view of the world. With the rise of model-based development this changes: Featureoriented programming, domain specific languages, and platform-based design use rich and custom syntaxes to capture domain specific abstractions, refinement mappings, and design spaces. In this paper we show how a formalization of rich syntax can be used to compose abstractions, validate refinement maps, and construct design spaces. We describe a tool FORMULA for computing these properties, and present a series of examples from automotive embedded systems.