Expressive power

Ability to cover a broad range of temporal scenarios required by the author.

A formal approach to define expressive power.

• Document presented by an authoring system as a state machine (see Figure 2) characterized by:

• A set of objects O.

• A set of inputs IN (clock tics and events on the objects).

• A set of outputs OUT (start, stop, ... on the objects).

• An execution loop defined as: getting some inputs, producing some outputs and updating some state variables.

The expressive power of a specification language can be evaluated by its ability to describe any state machine from a given set of objects and their related events.