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Generation of a Reversible Semantics for Erlang in Maude

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Formal Methods and Software Engineering (ICFEM 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13478))

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Abstract

In recent years, reversibility in concurrent settings has attracted interest thanks to its diverse applications in areas such as error recovery, debugging, and biological modeling. Also, it has been studied in many formalisms, including Petri nets, process algebras, and programming languages like Erlang. However, most attempts made so far suffer from the same limitation: they define the reversible semantics in an ad-hoc fashion. To address this limit, Lanese et al. have recently proposed a novel general method to derive a concurrent reversible semantics from a non-reversible one. However, in most interesting instances the method relies on infinite sets of reductions, making doubtful its practical applicability. We bridge the gap between theory and practice by implementing the above method in Maude. The key insight is that infinite sets of reductions can be captured by a small number of schemas in many relevant cases. This happens indeed for our application: the functional and concurrent fragment of Erlang. We extend the framework with a general rollback operator, allowing one to undo an action far in the past, including all and only its consequences. We can thus use our tool, e.g., as an oracle against which to test the reversible debugger CauDEr for Erlang, or as an executable specification for new reversible debuggers.

The work has been partially supported by French ANR project DCore ANR-18-CE25-0007. We thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Roberto Bruni for the useful comments and discussions provided. The second author also thanks INdAM-GNCS Project CUP_E55F22000270001 “Proprietà qualitative e quantitative di sistemi reversibili”.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In truth, \(\theta \) is a stack of environments, such design choice is discussed in Sect. 3.2.

  2. 2.

    Technicalities have been omitted, we refer to [22] for further details.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Univ. Grenoble Alpes, INRIA, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LIG, 38000, Grenoble, France

    Giovanni Fabbretti & Jean-Bernard Stefani

  2. Focus Team, University of Bologna, INRIA, 40137, Bologna, Italy

    Ivan Lanese

Authors
  1. Giovanni Fabbretti
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  2. Ivan Lanese
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  3. Jean-Bernard Stefani
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Giovanni Fabbretti , Ivan Lanese or Jean-Bernard Stefani .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Adrian Riesco

  2. East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, China

    Min Zhang

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Fabbretti, G., Lanese, I., Stefani, JB. (2022). Generation of a Reversible Semantics for Erlang in Maude. In: Riesco, A., Zhang, M. (eds) Formal Methods and Software Engineering. ICFEM 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13478. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17244-1_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17244-1_7

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