Abstract
The need to use position-dependent parameters often hampers the definition of flexible, extensible, and reusable abstractions for software composition. This observation has led us to explore the concept of forms, which are first-class extensible records and that, in combination with a small set of purely asymmetric operators, provide a core language to address this issue. One interesting application of forms is the definition of contractual specifications to ensure that a component can be safely combined with other components or deployed in a new context. In fact, contractual specifications explicitly and formally state what a component offers without entering into the details of how. In this paper, we develop a formal form-based framework for the definition of contractual specifications. More precisely, we study a substitution-free variant of the lambda-calculus, called \(\lambda{\mathcal F}\), where names are replaced with forms and parameter passing is modeled using explicit contexts and show how the \(\lambda{\mathcal F}\)-calculus can be used to define syntactic contractual specifications.
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Lumpe, M. (2005). A Lambda Calculus with Forms. In: Gschwind, T., Aßmann, U., Nierstrasz, O. (eds) Software Composition. SC 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3628. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11550679_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11550679_7
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