Expressiveness of Generic Process Shape Types

Shape types are a general concept of process types which work for many process calculi. We extend the previously published Poly* system of shape types to support name restriction. We evaluate the expressiveness of the extended system by showing that shape types are more expressive than an implicitly typed pi-calculus and an explicitly typed Mobile Ambients. We demonstrate that the extended system makes it easier to enjoy advantages of shape types which include polymorphism, principal typings, and a type inference implementation.Comment: Submitted to Trustworthy Global Computing (TGC) 2010

Ten virtues of structured graphs

This paper extends the invited talk by the first author about the virtues of structured graphs. The motivation behind the talk and this paper relies on our experience on the development of ADR, a formal approach for the design of styleconformant, reconfigurable software systems. ADR is based on hierarchical graphs with interfaces and it has been conceived in the attempt of reconciling software architectures and process calculi by means of graphical methods. We have tried to write an ADR agnostic paper where we raise some drawbacks of flat, unstructured graphs for the design and analysis of software systems and we argue that hierarchical, structured graphs can alleviate such drawbacks

A Universal Session Type for Untyped Asynchronous Communication

In the simply-typed lambda-calculus we can recover the full range of expressiveness of the untyped lambda-calculus solely by adding a single recursive type U = U -> U. In contrast, in the session-typed pi-calculus, recursion alone is insufficient to recover the untyped pi-calculus, primarily due to linearity: each channel just has two unique endpoints. In this paper, we show that shared channels with a corresponding sharing semantics (based on the language SILL_S developed in prior work) are enough to embed the untyped asynchronous pi-calculus via a universal shared session type U_S. We show that our encoding of the asynchronous pi-calculus satisfies operational correspondence and preserves observable actions (i.e., processes are weakly bisimilar to their encoding). Moreover, we clarify the expressiveness of SILL_S by developing an operationally correct encoding of SILL_S in the asynchronous pi-calculus

Mechanising syntax with binders in Coq

Mechanising binders in general-purpose proof assistants such as Coq is cumbersome and difficult. Yet binders, substitutions, and instantiation of terms with substitutions are a critical ingredient of many programming languages. Any practicable mechanisation of the meta-theory of the latter hence requires a lean formalisation of the former. We investigate the topic from three angles: First, we realise formal systems with binders based on both pure and scoped de Bruijn algebras together with basic syntactic rewriting lemmas and automation. We automate this process in a compiler called Autosubst; our final tool supports many-sorted, variadic, and modular syntax. Second, we justify our choice of realisation and mechanise a proof of convergence of the sigma calculus, a calculus of explicit substitutions that is complete for equality of the de Bruijn algebra corresponding to the lambda calculus. Third, to demonstrate the practical usefulness of our approach, we provide concise, transparent, and accessible mechanised proofs for a variety of case studies refined to de Bruijn substitutions.Die Mechanisierung von Bindern in universellen Beweisassistenten wie Coq ist arbeitsaufwändig und schwierig. Binder, Substitutionen und die Instantiierung von Substitutionen sind jedoch kritischer Bestandteil vieler Programmiersprachen. Deshalb setzt eine praktikable Mechanisierung der Metatheorie von Programmiersprachen eine elegante Formalisierung von Bindern voraus. Wir nähern uns dem Thema aus drei Richtungen an: Zuerst realisieren wir formale Systeme mit Bindern mit Hilfe von reinen und indizierten de Bruijn Algebren, zusammen mit grundlegenden syntaktischen Gleichungen und Automatisierung. Wir automatisieren diesen Prozess in einem Kompilierer namens Autosubst. Unser finaler Kompilierer unterstützt Sortenlogik, variadische Syntax und modulare Syntax. Zweitens rechtfertigen wir unsere Repräsentation und mechanisieren einen Beweis der Konvergenz des SP-Kalküls, einem Kalkül expliziter Substitutionen der bezüglich der Gleichheit der puren de Bruijn Algebra des -Kalküls vollständig ist. Drittens entwickeln wir kurze, transparente und leicht zugängliche mechanisierte Beweise für diverse Fallstudien, die wir an de Bruijn Substitutionen angepasst haben. Wir weisen so die praktische Anwendbarkeit unseres Ansatzes nach

An Algebra of Hierarchical Graphs

We define an algebraic theory of hierarchical graphs, whose axioms characterise graph isomorphism: two terms are equated exactly when they represent the same graph. Our algebra can be understood as a high-level language for describing graphs with a node-sharing, embedding structure, and it is then well suited for defining graphical representations of software models where nesting and linking are key aspects

Feasible reactivity in a synchronous pi-calculus

Reactivity is an essential property of a synchronous program. Informally, it guarantees that at each instant the program fed with an input will `react' producing an output. In the present work, we consider a refined property that we call ` feasible reactivity'. Beyond reactivity, this property guarantees that at each instant both the size of the program and its reaction time are bounded by a polynomial in the size of the parameters at the beginning of the computation and the size of the largest input. We propose a method to annotate programs and we develop related static analysis techniques that guarantee feasible reactivity for programs expressed in the S-pi-calculus. The latter is a synchronous version of the pi-calculus based on the SL synchronous programming model

Generic process shape types and the Poly* system

Shape types are a general concept of process types which allows verification of various properties of processes from various calculi. The key property is that shape types “look like processes”, that is, they resemble process structure and content. PolyV, originally designed by Makholm and Wells, is a type system scheme which can be instantiated to a shape type system for many calculi. Every PolyV instantiation has desirable properties including subject reduction, polymorphism, the existence of principal typings, and a type inference algorithm. In the first part of this thesis, we fix and describe inconsistencies found in the original PolyV system, we extend the system to support name restriction, and we provide a detailed proof of the correctness of the system. In the second part, we present a description of the type inference algorithm which we use to constructively prove the existence of principal typings. In the third part, we present various applications of shape types which demonstrate their advantages. Furthermore we prove that shape types can provide the same expressive power as and also strictly superior expressive power than predicates of three quite dissimilar analysis systems from the literature, namely, (1) an implicitly typed π-calculus, (2) an explicitly typed Mobile Ambients, (3) and a flow analysis system for BioAmbients.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) EP/C013573/