From quemada@dit.upm.es Tue Jun 16 16:56 MET 1998

=========== Description of the E-LOTOS New Work Item ==============

        E-LOTOS has been conceived with the goal of being a formal
specification language able to describe systems at various levels of
abstraction, following many of the main goals and design principles
which guided the definition of the preceding LOTOS standard. This
includes a well defined mathematical semantic definition, as well as the
inclusion of a number of capabilities which should formally support a
system design cycle, i.e. abstraction, information hiding,
implementation independence, stepwise refinement, testing and
conformance testing, .... 

        The initial LOTOS goals were enriched in the definition of the
Work Item with feedback coming from the application of LOTOS in system
design in industrial environments. The purpose and scope of the
definition of the new Work Item on "Enhancement to LOTOS" summarizes the
main conclusions obtained from the practical application of LOTOS. Those
include executability, user friendly data types, predefined types,
partial functions, subtypes, modules, object orientation, dynamic
reconfiguration, gate typing, partial synchronization, time, priorities,
... 

        In addition, the inclusion of the E-LOTOS WI in the framework of
ODP (Open Distributed Processing) in 1994 has widened the domain of
applicability of the revised standard to a larger number of systems and
has introduced new requirements. Although many of the requirements
imposed by ODP were already in the definition of the E-LOTOS Work Item,
a much closer alignment was pursued from then with existing ODP
standards such as IDL, the ODP viewpoints and models, .... 

        The E-LOTOS work started officially in 1991 when a question was
raised in ISO/IEC regarding the creation of a Work Item on "Enhancements
to LOTOS". The resolution of the question led to the creation of a WI
which started in the fall of 1993. Nevertheless work on enhancing LOTOS
had started several years before guided by industrial usage experiments.
This document is the result of several years of work in which a large
number of enhancement proposals have been analyzed and assessed against
the objectives of the Work Item. 

        In May 1996 in the Kansas City SC21 plenary the selection of the
enhancements to be included in E-LOTOS was made. The selected enhancements
remove known limitations and extend the expressiveness, abstraction 
capabilities, structuring capabilities, user friendliness,... of the 
preceding version of the standard. The resulting language meets the 
initial goals to a large extent.

        The project reached CD status after the ballot closing early in
97 (11 countries supported it, 3 voted against. It was the first round).
About 1 month ago an FCD has been submitted for balloting (the comments 
of the tree negative votes have been dealt appropiatedly and we expect 
a larger support). I think that the number of the document under ballot 
is ISO/IEC CD 15437.