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Anatomy of an operation declaration

The CORBA specification describes the syntax of an operation declaration (see [5]). The syntax is part of the Interface Definition Language (IDL). The grammar presented in that section describes the syntax which induces a formal language. In figure 7.2 the anatomy of an operation declaration is given, using a graphical representation of the grammar where the arrows denote ``consists of'' relations. Thus, according to the CORBA standard, an operation declaration consists of a result type, an ordered list of parameters and so on. A parameter declaration itself consists of a directional attribute (`in`, `out` or `inout`), a parameter type and an identifier.

Note that the ``graph'' depicted in figure 7.2 already has some resemblance to a conceptual graph. We propose to model the information pertinent to an operation invocation through a CG. The anatomy of an operation declaration as depicted in figure 7.2 provides a hint on how to accomplish this task.

Figure 7.2: Syntax of an operation declaration.