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I think joearms laid out the rough spec for this in UBF(c):

https://ubf.github.io/ubf/ubf-user-guide.en.html

but part (c) was only ever a sketch of a service/event grammar.

I implemented REGEV (regular expression for events) in my previous job. It was a REGEX for event types, but in that case, applied to log/trace emissions from test runs. So it allowed you to specify a regex of what events to expect for success, and had various listening and pattern-matching streams for runtime verification. It did not generate full-blown state machines for every protocol grammar. The wildcard matching helped ensure the tests were not fragile to minor changes to the code, or extra trace/log emissions.

So I think the opposite (complement) of what you were describing - not a specification of what should happen, but a grammar pattern to match downstream of what actually happened.

P.S. It's closed source, but the company is bankrupt, so maybe the IP will surface some day.



Would love to talk more about this with you, do you have an email address I can email you with?

Did you regex engine support commutative events? (Happen in either order?)




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