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9 Library Concepts

Specifications may be  named by  definitions and collected in  libraries. In the context of a library, the (re)use of a specification may be replaced by a  reference to it through its name. The current association between names and the specifications that they reference is called the  global environment; it may vary throughout a library, e.g., with  linear visibility the global environment for a named specification is determined exclusively by the definitions that precede it.

The local environment given to each named specification in a library should be independent of the other specifications in the library. Thus any dependence between the specifications is always apparent from the explicit references to the names of specifications.

A library may be located at a particular  site on the Internet, and addressed by a  URL (uniform resource locator). Each library may incorporate the  downloading of named specifications from other libraries, which takes place whenever the library is used.

The semantics of a specification library is a map taking each specification name defined in it to the semantics of that specification. The initial global environment for the library is empty.


CoFI Document: CASL/Summary-v0.97 --Version 0.97-- 20 May 1997.
Comments to cofi-language@brics.dk

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