17. A general-purpose, computer-implemented translator that operates on a specification for a system, having system components, a behavior description for each component, and a template therefor, for translating the specification from an initial representation thereof into another representation of the system, comprising: a computer-implemented extraction module (30, 32) for extracting behavior descriptions from a schematic-capture database (16), which includes the collection of components; a computer-implemented tagging module for assigning a keyword to each system component; a computer-implemented output module for outputting an output facsimile for any component which is not linked to an other form representation keyword match by said comparison module; a computer-implemented analysis module (34) including one or more behavior-specific translators (36, 38, 40, 46, 50, 52) for reducing the behavior description to a mathematical depiction of the components of the system; a computer-implemented comparison module to compare said mathematical depiction of the behavior properties of a system component to the other form component representations by matching the properties to said keywords; a computer-implemented decision module (68) for determining whether the component properties are expressed in primitive form of the other representation of the system; a computer-implemented graphical interface module including a table forming module for forming a property-value table for each component from the property-value pairs associated with a component; and at least one computer-implemented synthesis module (42, 54) for transforming said mathematical depiction into another representation of the system.
18. The translator of claim 17 which further includes an error-checking module (90) for examining said property-value table for errors.