[DotGNU]DotGNU and ASML

[Brian T Rice]

Hello,

I just joined the mailing list; I am a developer and consultant in the
Seattle area who works in the Lisp and Smalltalk fields, and also in
formal verification systems and executable specification languages.
Recently I met with the consulting group responsible for the ASML
implementation and development for MicroSoft's development tools,
considering working with them in various ways.

ASML is the Abstract State Machine Language (see
http://research.microsoft.com/fse/ ), an executable specification language
that can be used to check and generate tests for code automatically.
Microsoft is recently using this internally to specify the behavior of its
code and to debug it. ASML is based on the concept of concurrent state
machines, and is fairly intuitive to use. Note that most of the published
documents are in non-Free Word document format, although the technical
papers are all in PostScript.

So, I am offering a port of ASML to the dot-gnu platform. I can accomplish
an initial version using a program in the Maude language in just a month
or so, but Maude has not yet been shifted to the GPL; this license shift
is due in the fall.

Now, I should mention that I see this as beneficial since many developers
will want to trust that their code works based on some testing, and it
seems that a lot of .NET code will need some quality testing, and
portability of the tool between .NET and .GNU will improve the situation
a bit.

So here are my questions. I've checked out the DotGNU website, and have
seen no mention of a counterpart to ASML or its role. Is there an interest
in this kind of thing? How much support would be needed (like what tools
would you want it integrated into; ASML is used within M$ Word for
example)?

I am also looking for some funding to do this; what companies might I
inquire to that are interested in dotGNU's applications? Finally, comments
and questions are invited. Keep in mind that I have used various
specification languages before, but have not developed under Windows in a
while, so I have to come up to speed on the specific issues.

Thank you,
Brian Rice