A programming language design must strike a balance between validatability, expressiveness, and efficiency. Bridging the gap between domain concepts and the encoding of these concepts in a programming language is one of the core challenges of software engineering. The validatability of a language is a measure of the size of this gap. In a language with a high validatability index, one can express intent with relatively little encoding, which makes it straightforward to establish that a program ‘does the right thing’. Validatability decreases with increasing encoding.

The objective of my thesis work is to do a case study to investigate this balance in the domain of information systems. Information systems are systems for the collection, organization, storage, and communication of information. Information systems aim to support operations, management and decision-making. In order to do this, the data in information systems is filtered and processed to create new data.