Session Types with Runtime Adaptation: Overview and Examples

In recent work, we have developed a session types discipline for a calculus that features the usual constructs for session establishment and communication, but also two novel constructs that enable communicating processes to be stopped, duplicated, or discarded at runtime. The aim is to understand whether known techniques for the static analysis of structured communications scale up to the challenging context of context-aware, adaptable distributed systems, in which disciplined interaction and runtime adaptation are intertwined concerns. In this short note, we summarize the main features of our session-typed framework with runtime adaptation, and recall its basic correctness properties. We illustrate our framework by means of examples. In particular, we present a session representation of supervision trees, a mechanism for enforcing fault-tolerant applications in the Erlang language.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2013, arXiv:1312.221

On the Expressive Power of Multiple Heads in CHR

Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is a committed-choice declarative language which has been originally designed for writing constraint solvers and which is nowadays a general purpose language. CHR programs consist of multi-headed guarded rules which allow to rewrite constraints into simpler ones until a solved form is reached. Many empirical evidences suggest that multiple heads augment the expressive power of the language, however no formal result in this direction has been proved, so far. In the first part of this paper we analyze the Turing completeness of CHR with respect to the underneath constraint theory. We prove that if the constraint theory is powerful enough then restricting to single head rules does not affect the Turing completeness of the language. On the other hand, differently from the case of the multi-headed language, the single head CHR language is not Turing powerful when the underlying signature (for the constraint theory) does not contain function symbols. In the second part we prove that, no matter which constraint theory is considered, under some reasonable assumptions it is not possible to encode the CHR language (with multi-headed rules) into a single headed language while preserving the semantics of the programs. We also show that, under some stronger assumptions, considering an increasing number of atoms in the head of a rule augments the expressive power of the language. These results provide a formal proof for the claim that multiple heads augment the expressive power of the CHR language.Comment: v.6 Minor changes, new formulation of definitions, changed some details in the proof

Perturbative superstrata

Issued under a Creative Commons Attribution LicenceS.G. has been partially supported by MIUR-PRIN contract 2009-KHZKRX, by the Padova University Project CPDA119349 and by INFN. R.R. has been partially supported by STFC Standard GrantST/J000469/1 “String Theory, Gauge Theory and Duality”

Desnudez ritual. Vestirse y desvestirse en los Fasti de Ovidio

Ovid’s Fasti is a work of significance in defining the relationship between religious identity and clothing. This article examines the interplay between dressing and the divine and considers the key role that dressing, undressing, and nakedness plays in the worship of certain deities in the Fasti. Clothing and nudity are intimately linked to the changing nature of the socio-political landscape in the worship of these deities. Contemporary rites in 1st cent. Rome relate to fertility, blur social boundaries, and recall ancient preliterate peoples prior to cultivation, providing historical continuity of cultic practices.Los Fasti de ovidio son una obra de gran importancia para analizar la relación existente entre la identidad religiosa y la vestimenta. este artículo examina la interacción entre el vestir y lo divino y aborda el papel clave que desempeña la vestimenta, el desvestirse, y la desnudez en el culto de ciertas deidades en los Fasti. la ropa y la desnudez están íntimamente ligadas a la naturaleza cambiante del panorama sociopolítico en el culto de estas divinidades. los rituales con temporáneos en la Roma del primer siglo se relacionan con la fertilidad, difuminan los límites sociales y recuerdan a los antiguos pueblos preliterarios anteriores a la agricultura, proporcionando continuidad histórica a las prácticas cultuales

Adaptable processes

We propose the concept of adaptable processes as a way of overcoming the limitations that process calculi have for describing patterns of dynamic process evolution. Such patterns rely on direct ways of controlling the behavior and location of running processes, and so they are at the heart of the adaptation capabilities present in many modern concurrent systems. Adaptable processes have a location and are sensible to actions of dynamic update at runtime; this allows to express a wide range of evolvability patterns for concurrent processes. We introduce a core calculus of adaptable processes and propose two verification problems for them: bounded and eventual adaptation. While the former ensures that the number of consecutive erroneous states that can be traversed during a computation is bound by some given number k, the latter ensures that if the system enters into a state with errors then a state without errors will be eventually reached. We study the (un)decidability of these two problems in several variants of the calculus, which result from considering dynamic and static topologies of adaptable processes as well as different evolvability patterns. Rather than a specification language, our calculus intends to be a basis for investigating the fundamental properties of evolvable processes and for developing richer languages with evolvability capabilities

Modifying Is Better Than Deleting: A New Approach To Base Revision

We present three approaches to belief base revision, which are examined also in the case in which the sentences in the base are partitioned between those which can and those which cannot be changed; the approaches are shown to be semantically equivalent. A new approach is then presented, based on the modification of individual rules, instead of deletion. The resulting base is semantically equivalent to that generated by the other approaches, in the sense that it has the same models, but the rule part alone has less models, that is, is subjected to a smaller change