Semantics of reactive systems in abstract time

Huizing, Cornelis; Gerth, Rob

doi:10.1007/bfb0031997

Cited by 28 publications

(31 citation statements)

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“…These frameworks are also accompanied by semantic formalizations that produce prescriptive semantics. A notable example of these frameworks is the semantic framework of Huizing and Gerth [50] for a class of BSML semantics that supports only internal events. The only semantic decision point in their framework is for the semantics of internal events.…”

Section: Formal Deconstructional Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prescriptive Semantics for Big-Step Modelling Languages

Esmaeilsabzali

Day

2010

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

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With the popularity of model-driven methodologies and the abundance of modelling languages, a major question for a modeller is: Which language is suitable for modelling a system under study? To answer this question, one not only needs to know the range of relevant languages for modelling the system under study, but also needs to be able to compare these languages. In this dissertation, I consider these challenges from a semantic point of view for a diverse range of behavioural modelling languages that I refer to as the family of Big-Step Modelling Languages (BSMLs). There is a plethora of BSMLs, including statecharts, its variants, SCR, un-clocked variants of synchronous languages (e.g., Esterel and Argos), and reactive modules. BSMLs are often used to model systems that continuously interact with their environments. In a BSML model, the reaction of the model to an environmental input is a big step, which consists of a sequence of small steps, each of which can be the concurrent execution of a set of transitions. To provide a systematic method to understand and compare the semantics of BSMLs, this dissertation introduces the big-step semantic deconstruction framework that deconstructs the semantic design space of BSMLs into eight high-level, independent semantic aspects together with the enumeration of the common semantic options of each semantic aspect. The dissertation also presents a comparative analysis of the semantic options of each semantic aspect to assist one to choose one semantic option over another. A key idea in the big-step semantic deconstruction is that the high-level semantic aspects in the deconstruction recognize a big step as a whole, rather than only considering its constituent transitions operationally.A novelty of the big-step semantic deconstruction is that it lends itself to a systematic semantic formalization of most of the languages in the deconstruction. The dissertation presents a parametric, formal semantic definition method whose parameters correspond to the semantic aspects of the deconstruction, and thus it produces prescriptive semantics: The manifestation of a semantic option in the semantics of a BSML can be clearly identified.The way transitions are ordered to form a big step in a BSML is a source of semantic complexity: A modeller needs to be aware of the possible orders of the execution of transitions when constructing and analyzing a model. The dissertation introduces three semantic quality attributes that each exempts a modeller from considering an aspect of ordering in big steps. The ranges of BSMLs that support each of these semantic quality attributes are formally specified. These specifications indicate that achieving a semantic quality attribute in a BSML is a cross-cutting concern over the choices of its different semantic options. The semantic quality attributes together with iii the semantic analysis of individual semantic options can be used in tandem to assist a modeller or a semanticist to compare two BSMLs or to create a new, desired BSML from scratch....

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Section: Formal Deconstructional Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prescriptive Semantics for Big-Step Modelling Languages

Esmaeilsabzali

Day

2010

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

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“…Fig. 5, taken from [32], shows how each version of the semantics is an attempt to improve upon the other one. The discovery of Rob Gerth and Cees Huizing in 1988 that no semantics for reactive systems can be responsive, modular and causal at the same time, contributed a lot to the clarification of our many discus- sions with Amir on the semantics of Statecharts: there exists no best semantics for them!…”

Section: The 5 Different Semanticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Obviously, this concept of a step-based reaction still offers several choices as to what exactly constitutes a step [31,32,44,16,17]. One important choice is whether generated events may be sensed only in the next step, or already in the current step and may thus trigger the firing of further transitions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Only when this chain reaction of firing transitions comes to a halt is a step complete and becomes, according to the synchrony hypothesis, an atomic entity. Unsurprisingly, the semantics of [28] is not compositional since bundling transitions into an atomic step implies forgetting about the transitions' causal justification [32]. This shortcoming has later been remedied in a fully-abstract fashion by Huizing, Gerth and de Roever [33].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But for Statecharts there seemed to exist widely different semantics, which, in a sense, contradicted each other. Of course we didn't truly believe this at first, and, helped by the probing minds of Rob Gerth and Cees Huizing [32], we obtained criteria on which to judge the semantics: -Responsiveness, which guarantees an instantaneous response to a request for reaction, as dictated by Gérard Berry's synchrony hypothesis [7]. -Modularity, which consists of two properties: (1) The composition of two reactive systems is defined on the basis of their observable behaviours; there exist no additional inner details of the execution which can only be seen by the other system.…”

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confidence: 99%

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What Is in a Step: New Perspectives on a Classical Question

Roever

Lüttgen

Mendler

2010

Time for Verification

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Abstract. In their seminal 1991 paper "What is in a Step: On the Semantics of Statecharts", Pnueli and Shalev showed how, in the presence of global consistency and while observing causality, the synchronous language Statecharts can be given coinciding operational and declarative step semantics. Over the past decade, this semantics has been supplemented with order-theoretic, denotational, axiomatic and game-theoretic characterisations, thus revealing itself as a rather canonical interpretation of the synchrony hypothesis. In this paper, we survey these characterisations and use them to emphasise the close but not widely known relations of Statecharts to the synchronous language Esterel and to the field of logic programming. Additionally, we highlight some early reminiscences on Amir Pnueli's contributions to characterise the semantics of Statecharts.

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Synchronous/Reactive Programming of Concurrent System Software

Montague

McDowell

1997

Softw: Pract. Exper.

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SUMMARYSynchronous languages are intended for programming reactive systems. Reactive systems, which include real-time systems and key operating system components, interact continually with their environment. This paper considers the applicability of imperative synchronous/reactive languages to the development of general system software, that is, to the implementation of operating system kernels, file systems, databases,networks, server architectures, device drivers, etc. The languages Esterel and Reactive C (RC) receive special attention as Esterel is the oldest and most developed such language and RC is specifically designed for compatibility with C systems programming. An alternative soft-instruction software architecture is described, which is well suited to real-world system programming.

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Semantics of reactive systems in abstract time

Cited by 28 publications

References 4 publications

Prescriptive Semantics for Big-Step Modelling Languages

Prescriptive Semantics for Big-Step Modelling Languages

What Is in a Step: New Perspectives on a Classical Question

Synchronous/Reactive Programming of Concurrent System Software

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