External Format Guide

You mentioned external formats when we were talking about the User Guide, but can you tell me more about that?

Yes. If you remember, the idea was that you could embed a VDM specification, or parts of one, in a document - perhaps an appendix in a Word document, or as part of a paper written in LaTeX.

Right, that's an interesting idea.

It means that you only have one official source for the specification, which avoids the pitfall of having an updated document but an out of date specification file.

We've all been there.

Quite. So out of the box, VDMJ supports various formats - we call the 'external' formats. You can write in Word, LaTeX, ODF, markdown or AsciiDoc.

What's ODF?

The OpenDocument format. That's used by LibreOffice and various other tools.

Ah okay. So why do we need an External Format Guide?

The guide is really about how to write new external format readers. I would have called it the External Format Reader Writer's Guide, but...

...yeah...