RALE: An Environment for Simulation and Transformations

The Ramon Llull Environment (RALE), a development environment for parallel-distributed (PD) and real-time (RT) software, is reported. It has been developed with didactic and industrial concerns, and with integrating and unifying aims. This effort has resulted in a novel language, PADD, and in an integrated set of tools for both teaching concurrency and parallelism, and for developing real-life systems. The explicit character of parallelism in PADD allows the definition of hardware high-level models in addition to software. Extensive application of tree-like schemes for the user interface and to represent PADD programs, the introduction and usage for system refinement of the concept of Communication-extended Abstract Types (CATs), monitor elimination and communication elimination transformations, and their integration with simulation, allocation-mapping, and documentation generation tools are amongst the elements integrated within the environment. Its cooperation with well established specification and verification environments for concurrent programs is under investigation.