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Forge is a lightweight modeling language, similar to Alloy, that has been designed for teaching modeling and lightweight formal methods. It comprises three sublanguages or modes:

  • Froglet (#lang forge/bsl), a language for modeling using only functions and partial functions;
  • Relational Forge (#lang forge), an extension of Froglet to include relations and relational operators;
  • Temporal Forge (#lang forge/temporal), an extension of Forge to include linear-temporal operators (akin to Alloy 6 or Electrum).

Students can progress through this language hierarchy as new concepts are introduced in class; this lets the course avoid a steep language-learning curve and cover important practical material earlier than would otherwise be possible.

If there are three languages, are there three versions of the documentation?

No! In principle, we might ideally have three separate versions, but we are focusing (for now) on producing better documentation overall rather than taking on the subtle cross-language page-linking challenge.

We will nevertheless try to maintain a reasonable separation.