SPECIFYING AND GENERATING MULTILANGUAGE SOFTWARE-DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS

Integrated software environments use a project information base (PIB) as a repository of all project-related data. A software environment supporting a lifecycle methodology requires a multilanguage PIB, with component languages dedicated to various aspects and phases of project development (e.g. requirement and design specification notations, implementation language etc.). At the same time, one has to view a PIB as a database (or even a knowledge base), where project information is stored, and from which it may be queried using database methods. Therefore, a model for PIBs should equally address linguistic and database aspects of the project information representation. The goal of this paper is to introduce a formal model for multilanguage environments, suitable for representing PIBs. We build the model by extending attribute grammars and integrating them with the entity-relationship model. We also study basic properties of our formalism, formulate conditions to be obeyed by well formed specifications and describe an implementation.