The CONLAN Project: Status and Future Plans

CONLAN (CONsensus LANguage) is a general formal language construction mechanism for the description of hard- and firmware at different levels of abstraction. It has been developed by the international CONLAN Working Group. Members of the CONLAN language family are derived from a common root language called BCL (Base ConLan). This language provides the basic object types and operations to describe the behavior and the structure of digital systems in space and time. The paper is based on the CONLAN Draft Report (in print). The purpose of the paper is (1) to provide an informal introduction to the Draft Report version of BCL together with examples of its application (2) to outline some work on the derivation of languages from BCL and (3) to describe status and further plans for software tools supporting language derivation and implementation.