  The Language Server Protocol (LSP) changed the field of Integrated
Development Environments(IDEs), as it decouples core (programming) language
features functionality from editor smarts, thus lowering the effort required to
extend an IDE to support a language. The concept is a success and has been
adopted by several programming languages and beyond. This is shown by the
emergence of several LSP implementations for the many programming and
specification languages (languages with a focus on modelling, reasoning, or
proofs). However, for such languages LSP has been ad-hocly extended with the
additional functionalities that are typically not found for programming
languages and thus not supported in LSP. This foils the original LSP decoupling
goal, because the move towards a new IDE requires yet another re-implementation
of the ad-hoc LSP extension. In this paper we contribute with a conservative
extension of LSP providing a first proposal towards a standard protocol
decoupling the support of specification languages from the IDE. We hope our
research attracts the larger community and motivates the need of a joint task
force leading to a standardised LSP extension serving the particular needs of
specification languages.

Software Engineering