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Are Synchronous Programs Logic Programs?

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Principled Software Development

Abstract

Synchronous languages have been introduced as programming languages that directly reflect the nature of reactive systems: Their execution is divided into discrete reaction steps such that in each reaction step, inputs are read from the environment and outputs are instantaneously computed. Reaction steps, which are also called macro steps, consist thereby of a set of atomic micro step actions that are executed in the variable environment associated with the macro step. At the beginning of the macro step, only the values of the input variables are known in this variable environment, and the values of the remaining variables have to be computed according to the data-dependencies. Since the micro step actions depend on the variable environment that they also create, it might be the case that there are cyclic dependencies. Whether such cyclic dependencies can be constructively resolved has to be checked by a compile-time causality analysis which will ensure that there is for all inputs a suitable schedule of the micro steps. If the synchronous programs are converted to guarded actions as done in the author’s Averest system, some relationships with logic programs can be found: In particular, the concepts of reaction-to-absence of synchronous languages and negation-to-failure of logic programs seem to be the same; another analogy is found for the generation of equation-based code of synchronous programs and the completion of logic programs, and also for the fix-point analyses defined in both paradigms. This paper outlines these analogies between the two paradigms of programming languages and discusses whether further known semantics of logic programs like well-founded and stable models may find useful counterparts in the synchronous world in future.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. TU Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Klaus Schneider

  2. Insiders Technologies GmbH, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Marc Dahlem

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  1. Klaus Schneider
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Correspondence to Klaus Schneider .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Peter Müller

  2. Institut für Softwaretechnik und Fahrzeuginformatik, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

    Ina Schaefer

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Schneider, K., Dahlem, M. (2018). Are Synchronous Programs Logic Programs?. In: Müller, P., Schaefer, I. (eds) Principled Software Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98047-8_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98047-8_16

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