Pragmatics Twelve Years Later: A Report on Lingua Franca

Abstract

In 2010, Fuhrmann et al. argued for enhancing modeler productivity by providing tooling that, put simply, combines the best of textual and graphical worlds. They referred to this as pragmatics, and argued that a key enabler would be the ability to automatically synthesize customized graphical views from a (possibly textual) model. The model would be the “ground truth” used, for example, for downstream code synthesis and simulation; the graphical views would typically be abstractions from the model serving various purposes, including documentation.Twelve years later, we reflect on their proposal, and illustrate the current state with the recently developed polyglot coordination language Lingua Franca (LF). LF has been designed with pragmatics in mind since early on, and some characteristics of LF make it particularly suited for pragmatics-aware programming and modeling. However, the underlying pragmatic principles are broadly applicable, and by now a set of mature open source tools is available for putting them into practice.

High-Performance Deterministic Concurrency using Lingua Franca

“…Note however, that a full discussion of LF including its syntax and tooling is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, we base our discussion on LF's diagrammatic representation of programswhich gets synthesized from LF source code automatically [78]. A complete introduction to LF's textual syntax is given by Lohstroh et al [53].…”