The Abstract Behavioral Specification Language: A Tutorial Introduction

ABS (for abstract behavioral specification) is a novel language for modeling feature-rich, distributed, object-oriented systems at an abstract, yet precise level. ABS has a clear and simple concurrency model that permits synchronous as well as actor-style asynchronous communication. ABS abstracts away from specific datatype or I/O implementations, but is a fully executable language and has code generators for Java, Scala, and Maude. ABS goes beyond conventional programming languages in two important aspects: first, it embeds architectural concepts such as components or feature hierarchies and allows to connect features with their implementation in terms of product families. In contrast to standard OO languages, code reuse in ABS is feature-based instead of inheritance-based. Second, ABS has a formal semantics and has been designed with formal analyzability in mind. This paper gives a tutorial introduction to ABS. We discuss all important design features, explain why they are present and how they are intended to be used.