Extending CORBA IDL to Specify Behavior
 			      with Larch
				   
				  by
				   
		  Gary T. Leavens and Yoonsik Cheon
	Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University
	     226 Atanasoff Hall, Ames Iowa 50011-1040 USA
	     leavens@cs.iastate.edu, cheon@cs.iastate.edu


			       Abstract

This position paper explores how model-oriented specification
in the Larch style [Guttag-Horning93] could be adapted to specify
the behavioral semantics for objects in distributed systems.
Our position is that the model-oriented specifications [Wing90] are ideally
suited to behavioral specification of distributed object interfaces,
and that the Larch style of interface specification has some
interesting advantages over other model-oriented specification formalisms.
As an example we discuss how to formally specify interfaces given in
the Interface Definition Language (IDL) for the distributed object management
framework specified by the Object Management Group (OMG) for its Common Object
Request Broker Architecture (CORBA).  We believe that a Larch/CORBA
interface language could extend IDL with precise behavioral semantics,
that it would not be extraordinarily difficult to design, and that
it would be easy to use.