The Meaning of UML

One of the awkward issues about the UML is that, although the specification describes in great detail what well-formed UML is, it doesn't have much to say about what the UML means outside of the rarefied world of the UML meta-model. No formal definition exists of how the UML maps to any particular programming language. You cannot look at a UML diagram and say exactly what the equivalent code would look like. However, you can get a rough idea of what the code would look like. In practice, that's enough to be useful. Development teams often form their local conventions for these, and you'll need to be familiar with the ones in use.