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Table of Contents:

Definition and Overview

1. Benefits of a Specification Language

2. History

3. SDL Characteristics

4. Theoretical Model and Structure

5. Sharing Information, Reuse, and Maintenance

6. Openness, Portability, Scalability, and Distributed Applications Openness

7. Graphical and Textual Notations and Application Areas

Self-Test

Glossary

PDF of this tutorial

ADT
abstract data type

ASN.1
abstract syntax notation one

CCITT
Comité Consultatif International Telegraphique et Telephonique

CORBA
common object request broker architecture

FSM
finite state machines

IDL
interface description language

IPC
interprocess communication

ITU
International Telecommunications Union

ITU–T
the telecommunications standardization sector of ITU

OMG
Object Management Group

OMT
object modeling technique

OO
object-oriented

SDL
specification and description language

SDL–96
SDL version 1996

TTCN
tree and tabular combined notation

UML
unified modeling language