scope:

This Recommendation defines the object-oriented data features of the Specification and Description Language. The features defined in this document include: polymorphic object-oriented data including virtual methods, multiple inheritance of abstract types, run-time type identification and type coercion, as well as accessing data values by references.

Without these features the language would afford limited scalability and be unsuitable for the definition of real-time embedded software applications. For this reason, specifications in the Specification and Description Language use ITU-T Z.107 features. Together with [ITU-T Z.100], [ITU-T Z.101], [ITU-T Z.102], [ITU-T Z.103], [ITU-T Z.104], [ITU-T Z.105] and [ITU-T Z.106], this Recommendation forms a reference manual for the language.

Objective

The objective of this Recommendation is to fully define the object-oriented data related features of the Specification and Description Language. Some of the ITU-T Z.107 material is also in [ITU-T Z.100], [ITU-T Z.101] and [ITU-T Z.104]. These definitions should be entirely consistent. The descriptions in [ITU-T Z.100] and [ITU-T Z.101] are overviews to enable data to be used with other features of SDL-2010. The ITU-T Z.104 definition is intended to be complete (with the exception of definition of data types in ASN.1 modules - see [ITU-T Z.105]). The ITU-T Z.107 definition extends the language with object-oriented data.

Application

This Recommendation is part of the reference manual for the Specification and Description Language.

The use of object-oriented data is fundamental to the description of scalable and efficient real-time embedded applications. Thus, it is almost certain that some features defined in Recommendation ITU-T Z.107 will appear in any specification of applications in SDL-2010.