Abstract State Machines 1988-1998: Commented ASM Bibliography

An annotated bibliography of papers which deal with or use Abstract State Machines (ASMs), as of January 1998.Comment: Also maintained as a BibTeX file at http://www.eecs.umich.edu/gasm

Coordination using a Single-Writer Multiple-Reader Concurrent Logic Language

The principle behind concurrent logic programming is a set of processes which co-operate in monotonically constraining a global set of variables to particular values. Each process will have access to only some of the variables, and a process may bind a variable to a tuple containing further variables which may be bound later by other processes. This is a suitable model for a coordination language. In this paper we describe a type system which ensures the co-operation principle is never breached, and which makes clear through syntax the pattern of data flow in a concurrent logic program. This overcomes problems previously associated with the practical use of concurrent logic languages

Programming Languages for Distributed Computing Systems

When distributed systems first appeared, they were programmed in traditional sequential languages, usually with the addition of a few library procedures for sending and receiving messages. As distributed applications became more commonplace and more sophisticated, this ad hoc approach became less satisfactory. Researchers all over the world began designing new programming languages specifically for implementing distributed applications. These languages and their history, their underlying principles, their design, and their use are the subject of this paper. We begin by giving our view of what a distributed system is, illustrating with examples to avoid confusion on this important and controversial point. We then describe the three main characteristics that distinguish distributed programming languages from traditional sequential languages, namely, how they deal with parallelism, communication, and partial failures. Finally, we discuss 15 representative distributed languages to give the flavor of each. These examples include languages based on message passing, rendezvous, remote procedure call, objects, and atomic transactions, as well as functional languages, logic languages, and distributed data structure languages. The paper concludes with a comprehensive bibliography listing over 200 papers on nearly 100 distributed programming languages

Logic programming for real-time control of telecommunication switching systems

AbstractAn experiment using logic programming in the specification and implementation of a telecommunication switching system is reported, and one of the main modules in the system, a telephone-line controller, is described in detail as an illustrative example. The system is described in terms of transition relations in a labeled transition system. The programming language used is a variant of the parallel logic language PARLOG augmented with annotations to express timing constraints. The operational model of PARLOG is modified to handle time by allowing each goal-reduction process in a query to maintain its own logical clock, which can be read and set by the goal-reduction process itself. A metainterpreter is given to describe the operational behavior and an implementation scheme for the language

Specifying and reasoning about concurrent systems in logic

Imperial Users onl

An abstract machine for restricted and-parallel execution of logic programs

Although the sequential execution speed of logic programs has been greatly improved by the concepts introduced in the Warren Abstract Machine (WAM), parallel execution represents the only way to increase this speed beyond the natural limits of sequential systems. However, most proposed parallel logic programming execution models lack the performance optimizations and storage efficiency of sequential systems. This paper presents a parallel abstract machine which is an extension of the WAM and is thus capable of supporting ANDParallelism without giving up the optimizations present in sequential implementations. A suitable instruction set, which can be used as a target by a variety of logic programming languages, is also included. Special instructions are provided to support a generalized version of "Restricted AND-Parallelism" (RAP), a technique which reduces the overhead traditionally associated with the run-time management of variable binding conflicts to a series of simple run-time checks, which select one out of a series of compiled execution graphs