The e language: a fresh separation of concerns

The e programming language enjoys widespread use in the microchip industry with applications to specification, modeling, testing and verification of hardware systems and their operating environments. Unique features of e include a combination of object oriented and constraint oriented mechanisms for the specification of data formats and interdependencies, interesting mechanisms of inheritance, and an efficient combination of interpreted and compiled code. Since the language is also extensible it serves as a living, industrial scale, implementation and application of the aspect oriented programming paradigm. This paper briefly describes the e language highlighting its novel features and their particular suitability to the task of hardware verification, and reports on our experience of aspect oriented programming in this intense commercial setting.