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Given
existing general purpose programming languages, programmers
inevitably have to write entangled code for a large class of
applications, including those that handle exception conditions.
While hardware development can extensively utilize automated
verification tools, software development relies on testing
which, besides being unreliable, often accounts for more than
half of the time and cost of the development. The Feature
Language Extensions (FLE) is a set of programming language
constructs designed to address these two issues.
The
FLE constructs allow the programmer to develop the programs of
the different concerns of an application as separate reusable
program modules, called features, even though these concerns may
change the execution flow of one another. Features are developed
according to a model instead of the code of other features. FLE
provides a tool to automatically detect the interaction
condition among features. Features can be integrated and their
interaction resolved in a reusable program module called a
feature package without modification. FLE supports an algorithm
to determine the satisfiability of predicate formulas as fast as
those for Boolean formulas. While the programmer may use
unbounded condition variables, such as an integer, a FLE feature
package can be represented by a finite state machine making it
directly amenable to automatic analysis.
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