Re: Methods

["Joel M. Halpern" <joel@ivyplan.com>]

Reading (and writing in) this discussion, I think we have agreement that we 
need methods.
I have a guess as to what the question that is trying to be raised is.

Given that we are defining requirements for the modeling language,
what are the requirements on the language in terms of what it can say about 
methods?
I will list some of the information we probably want:
Name
Signature (types of operands and results
description

Do we want formal or informal representation of error cases?
Do we want formal or informal descriptions of valid ranges on the 
parameters and results?
Do we want formal or informal description of valid combinations of 
parameters (if P1 is X, then P2 must be between Y and Z).

Clearly, we would like to be able to capture some of this 
information.  Equally clearly the more we require from the modeling 
language the harder it gets to meet the requirements.

My personal take on this is to use whatever descriptive power I can get 
from the modeling language we select, but beyond a reasonable method 
signature I would not REQUIRE that the chosen modeling language have formal 
capabilities for other things.

Once we have selected a modeling language, if it has additional 
capabilities, we will have to decide collectively how to use them.  And for 
information we want to have that is not formally representable we will have 
to decide where we want that to live.

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern