Design for reuse via structuring techniques for ASMs

Abstract

Gurevich's [26] abstract State Machines (ASMs), characterized by the parallel execution of abstract atomic actions in a global state, have been equipped in [13] with a refinement by standard composition concepts for structuring large machines that allows reusing machine components. Among these concepts are parameterized (possibly recursive) sub-ASMs. Here we illustrate their power for incremental and modular system design by unfolding, via appropriate ASM components, the architecture of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), resulting from the language layering in combination with the functional decomposition of the JVM into loader, verifier, and interpreter.We survey the ASM models for Java and the JVM that appear in [34], together with the mathematical and experimental analysis they support. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.