I'm happy to announce that my contribution to TUG 2011, the next TeX
Users Group International conference, has been accepted. Please find the
title and abstract below.
LaTeX Coding Standards
Because LaTeX (and ultimately TeX) is only a macro-expansion system, the
language does not impose any kind of good software engineering practice,
program structure or coding style whatsoever. As a consequence, writing
beautiful code (for some definition of "beautiful") requires a lot of
self-discipline from the programmer.
Maybe because in the LaTeX world, collaboration is not so widespread
(most packages are single-authored), the idea of some LaTeX Coding
Standards is not so pressing as with other programming languages. Some
people may, and probably have developed their own programming habits,
but when it comes to the LaTeX world as a whole, the situation is close
to anarchy.
Over the years, the permanent flow of personal development experiences
contributed to shape my own taste in terms of coding style. The issues
involved are numerous and their spectrum is very large: they range from
simple code layout (formatting, indentation, naming schemes etc.),
mid-level concerns such as modularity and encapsulation, to very
high-level concerns like package interaction/conflict management and
even some rules for proper social behavior.
In this talk, I will report on all these experiences and describe what I
think are good (or at least better) programming practices. I believe
that such practices do help in terms of code readability,
maintainability and extensibility, all key factors in software
evolution. They help me, perhaps they will help you too.
--
Resistance is futile. You will be jazzimilated.
Scientific site: http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier
Music (Jazz) site: http://www.didierverna.com
EPITA/LRDE, 14-16 rue Voltaire, 94276 Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France
Tel. +33 (0)1 44 08 01 85 Fax. +33 (0)1 53 14 59 22
After 9 years of releases with a leading "0." in their version number,
this might be unexpected:
We are pleased to announce the release of Spot 1.0.
Spot is a model-checking library developed collaboratively by LRDE
and LIP6. It provides algorithms and data structures to implement
the automata-theoretic approach to LTL model checking.
This major new releases features a set of completely rewritten
command-line tools, an implementation of reverse simulation,
and support for testing automata.
You can find the new release here:
http://spot.lip6.fr/dl/spot-1.0.tar.gz
A more detailed listing of the changes follows.
New in spot 1.0 (2012-10-27):
* License change: Spot is now distributed using GPL v3+ instead
of GPL v2+. This is because we started using some third-party
files distributed under GPL v3+.
* Command-line tools
Useful command-line tools are now installed in addition to the
library. Some of these tools were originally written for our test
suite and had evolved organically into useful programs with crappy
interfaces: they have now been rewritten with better argument
parsing, saner defaults, and they come with man pages.
- genltl: Generate LTL formulas from scalable patterns.
This offers 20 patterns so far.
- randltl: Generate random LTL/PSL formulas.
- ltlfilt: Filter lists of formulas according to several criteria
(e.g., match only safety formulas that are larger than
some given size). Besides being used as a "grep" tool
for formulas, this can also be used to convert
files of formulas between different syntaxes, apply
some simplifications, check whether to formulas are
equivalent, ...
- ltl2tgba: Translate LTL/PSL formulas into Büchi automata (TGBA,
BA, or Monitor). A fundamental change to the
interface is that you may now specify the goal of the
translation: do you you favor deterministic or smaller
automata?
- ltl2tgta: Translate LTL/PSL formulas into Testing Automata.
- ltlcross: Compare the output of translators from LTL/PSL to
Büchi automata, to find bug or for benchmarking. This
is essentially a Spot-based reimplementation of LBTT
that supports PSL in addition to LTL, and that can
output more statistics.
An introduction to these tools can be found on-line at
http://spot.lip6.fr/userdoc/tools.html
The former test versions of genltl and randltl have been removed
from the source tree. The old version of ltl2tgba with its
gazillion options is still is src/tgbatest/ and is meant to be
used for testing only. Although ltlcross is meant to replace
LBTT, we are still using both tools in this release; however this
is likely to be the last release of Spot that redistributes LBTT.
* New features in the Spot library:
- Support for various flavors of Testing Automata.
The flavors are:
+ "classical" Testing Automata, as used for instance by
Geldenhuys and Hansen (Spin'06), using Büchi and
livelock acceptance conditions.
+ Generalized Testing Automata, extending the previous
with multiple Büchi acceptance sets.
+ Transition-based Generalized Testing Automata moving Büchi
acceptance to transitions, and getting rid of livelock
acceptance conditions by expliciting stuttering self-loops.
Supporting algorithms include anything required to run
the automata-theoretic approach using testing automata:
+ dedicated synchronized product
+ dedicated emptiness-check for TA and GTA, as these
may require two passes because of the two kinds of
acceptance, while a TGTA can be checked for emptiness
with the same one-pass algorithm as a TGBA.
+ conversion from a TGBA to any of the above kind, with
options to reduce these automata with bisimulation,
and to produce a BA/GBA that require a single pass
(at the expense of determinism).
+ output in dot format for display
A discussion of these automata, part of Ala Eddine BEN SALEM's
PhD work, should appear in ToPNoC VI (LNCS 7400). The web-based
interface and the aforementioned ltl2tgta tool can be used
to build testing automata.
- TGBA can now be reduced by Reverse Simulation (in addition to
the Direct Simulation introduced in 0.9). A function called
iterated_simulations() will alternate direct and reverse
simulations in a loop as long as it diminishes the size of the
automaton.
- The enumerate_cycles class implements the Loizou-Thanisch
algorithm to enumerate elementary cycles in a SCC. As an
example of use, is_weak_scc() will tell whether an SCC is
inherently weak (all its cycles are accepting, or none of them
are).
- parse_lbt() will parse an LTL formula expressed in the prefix
syntax used (at least) by LBT, LBTT and Scheck.
to_lbt_string() can be used to print an LTL formula using this
syntax.
- to_wring_string() can be used to print an LTL formula into
Wring's syntax.
- The LTL/PSL parser now has a lenient mode that can be useful
to interpret atomic proposition with language-specific constructs.
In lenient mode, any (...) or {...} block that cannot be parsed
as formula will be assumed to be an atomic proposition.
For instance the input (a < b) U (process[2]@ok), normally
flagged as a syntax error, is read as "a < b" U "process[2]@ok"
in lenient mode.
- minimize_obligation() has a new option to disable WDBA
minimization it cases it would produce a deterministic automaton
that is bigger than the original TGBA. This can help
choosing between less states or more determinism.
- new functions is_deterministic() and count_nondet_states()
(The count of nondeterministic states is now displayed on
automata generated with the web interface.)
- A new class, "postprocessor", makes it easier to apply
all available simplification algorithms on a TGBA/BA/Monitors.
* Minor changes:
- The '*' operator can (again) be used as an AND in LTL formulas.
This is for compatibility with formula written in Wring's
syntax. However inside SERE it is interpreted as the Kleen
star.
- When printing a formula using Spin's LTL syntax, we don't
double-quote complex atomic propositions (that was not valid
Spin input anyway). For instance F"foo == 2" used to be
output as <>"foo == 2". We now output <>(foo == 2) instead.
The latter syntax is understood by Spin 6. It can be read
back by Spot in lenient mode (see above).
- The gspn-ssp benchmark has been removed.
