The play's the thing

For very understandable reasons phenomenological approaches predominate in the field of sensory urbanism. This paper does not seek to add to that particular discourse. Rather it takes Rorty’s postmodernized Pragmatism as its starting point and develops a position on the role of multi-modal design representation in the design process as a means of admitting many voices and managing multidisciplinary collaboration. This paper will interrogate some of the concepts underpinning the Sensory Urbanism project to help define the scope of interest in multi-modal representations. It will then explore a range of techniques and approaches developed by artists and designers during the past fifty years or so and comment on how they might inform the question of multi-modal representation. In conclusion I will argue that we should develop a heterogeneous tool kit that adopts, adapts and re-invents existing methods because this will better serve our purposes during the exploratory phase(s) of any design project that deals with complexity

Strategies in PRholog

PRholog is an experimental extension of logic programming with strategic conditional transformation rules, combining Prolog with Rholog calculus. The rules perform nondeterministic transformations on hedges. Queries may have several results that can be explored on backtracking. Strategies provide a control on rule applications in a declarative way. With strategy combinators, the user can construct more complex strategies from simpler ones. Matching with four different kinds of variables provides a flexible mechanism of selecting (sub)terms during execution. We give an overview on programming with strategies in PRholog and demonstrate how rewriting strategies can be expressed

Controlled Term Rewriting

International audienceMotivated by the problem of verification of imperative tree transformation programs, we study the combination, called controlled term rewriting systems (CntTRS), of term rewriting rules with con- straints selecting the possible rewrite positions. These constraints are specified, for each rewrite rule, by a selection automaton which defines a set of positions in a term based on tree automata computations. We show that reachability is PSPACE-complete for so-called monotonic CntTRS, such that the size of every left-hand-side of every rewrite rule is larger or equal to the size of the corresponding right-hand-side, and also for the class of context-free non-collapsing CntTRS, which transform Context-Free (CF) tree language into CF tree languages. When allowing size-reducing rules, reachability becomes undecidable, even for flat CntTRS (both sides of rewrite rules are of depth at most one) when restricting to words (i.e. function symbols have arity at most one), and for ground CntTRS (rewrite rules have no variables). We also consider a restricted version of the control such that a position is selected if the sequence of symbols on the path from that position to the root of the tree belongs to a given regular language. This restriction enables decision results in the above cases

A visual environment for developing context-sensitive term rewriting systems

Abstract. Over the past decade, researchers have found context-sensitive term-rewriting semantics to be powerful and expressive tools for modeling programming languages, particularly in establishing type soundness proofs. Unfortunately, developing such semantics is an error-prone activity. To address that problem, we have designed PLT Redex, an embedded domain-specific language that helps users interactively create and debug context-sensitive term-rewriting systems. We introduce the tool with a series of examples and discuss our experience using it in courses and developing an operational semantics for R 5 RS Scheme.

Rewriting Calculus with Fixpoints: Untyped and First-order Systems

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture. internationale.International audienceThe rewriting calculus, also called ρ-calculus, is a framework embedding λ-calculus and rewriting capabilities, by allowing abstraction not only on variables but also on patterns. The higher-order mechanisms of the λ-calculus and the pattern matching facilities of the rewriting are then both available at the same level. Many type systems for the λ-calculus can be generalized to the ρ-calculus: in this paper, we study extensively a first-order ρ-calculus à la Church, called ρstk→ . The type system of ρstk→ allows one to type (object oriented flavored) fixpoints, leading to an expressive and safe calculus. In particular, using pattern matching, one can encode and typecheck term rewriting systems in a natural and automatic way. Therefore, we can see our framework as a starting point for the theoretical basis of a powerful typed rewriting-based language