Object Constraint Language, The: Getting Your Models Ready for MDA, Second Edition

Foreword to the First Edition

For many years there has been a branch of computer science concerned with using formal logical languages to give precise and unambiguous descriptions of things. As an academic in the 1970s and 1980s I was very interested in such languages, for example Z and Larch. Unravelling the meaning of a statement in one of these languages is sometimes like a complex jigsaw puzzle, but once the unravelling is done the meaning is always crystal-clear and unambiguous. As I moved into the world of object-oriented methods I found a different way of specifying, using diagrams. With diagrams, the meaning is quite obvious, because once you understand how the basic elements of the diagram fit together, the meaning literally stares you ...