498 research outputs found
Unifying Requirements and Code: an Example
Requirements and code, in conventional software engineering wisdom, belong to
entirely different worlds. Is it possible to unify these two worlds? A unified
framework could help make software easier to change and reuse. To explore the
feasibility of such an approach, the case study reported here takes a classic
example from the requirements engineering literature and describes it using a
programming language framework to express both domain and machine properties.
The paper describes the solution, discusses its benefits and limitations, and
assesses its scalability.Comment: 13 pages; 7 figures; to appear in Ershov Informatics Conference, PSI,
Kazan, Russia (LNCS), 201
A Branching Time Model of CSP
I present a branching time model of CSP that is finer than all other models
of CSP proposed thus far. It is obtained by taking a semantic equivalence from
the linear time - branching time spectrum, namely divergence-preserving coupled
similarity, and showing that it is a congruence for the operators of CSP. This
equivalence belongs to the bisimulation family of semantic equivalences, in the
sense that on transition systems without internal actions it coincides with
strong bisimilarity. Nevertheless, enough of the equational laws of CSP remain
to obtain a complete axiomatisation for closed, recursion-free terms.Comment: Dedicated to Bill Roscoe, on the occasion of his 60th birthda
A discrete geometric model of concurrent program execution
A trace of the execution of a concurrent object-oriented program can be displayed in two-dimensions as a diagram of a non-metric finite geometry. The actions of a programs are represented by points, its objects and threads by vertical lines, its transactions by horizontal lines, its communications and resource sharing by sloping arrows, and its partial traces by rectangular figures. We prove informally that the geometry satisfies the laws of Concurrent Kleene Algebra (CKA); these describe and justify the interleaved implementation of multithreaded programs on computer systems with a lesser number of concurrent processors. More familiar forms of semantics (e.g., verification-oriented and operational) can be derived from CKA. Programs are represented as sets of all their possible traces of execution, and non-determinism is introduced as union of these sets. The geometry is extended to multiple levels of abstraction and granularity; a method call at a higher level can be modelled by a specification of the method body, which is implemented at a lower level. The final section describes how the axioms and definitions of the geometry have been encoded in the interactive proof tool Isabelle, and reports on progress towards automatic checking of the proofs in the paper
Global geometry optimization of clusters using a growth strategy optimized by a genetic algorithm
A new strategy for global geometry optimization of clusters is presented.
Important features are a restriction of search space to favorable
nearest-neighbor distance ranges, a suitable cluster growth representation with
diminished correlations, and easy transferability of the results to larger
clusters. The strengths and possible limitations of the method are demonstrated
for Si10 using an empirical potential.Comment: accepted by Chem.Phys.Letters; 10 pages text, plus 3 pages for Title,
abstract, and figure caption; figures 1a and 1
Space-efficient detection of unusual words
Detecting all the strings that occur in a text more frequently or less
frequently than expected according to an IID or a Markov model is a basic
problem in string mining, yet current algorithms are based on data structures
that are either space-inefficient or incur large slowdowns, and current
implementations cannot scale to genomes or metagenomes in practice. In this
paper we engineer an algorithm based on the suffix tree of a string to use just
a small data structure built on the Burrows-Wheeler transform, and a stack of
bits, where is the length of the string and
is the size of the alphabet. The size of the stack is except for very
large values of . We further improve the algorithm by removing its time
dependency on , by reporting only a subset of the maximal repeats and
of the minimal rare words of the string, and by detecting and scoring candidate
under-represented strings that in the string. Our
algorithms are practical and work directly on the BWT, thus they can be
immediately applied to a number of existing datasets that are available in this
form, returning this string mining problem to a manageable scale.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1502.0637
Operational Semantics of Process Monitors
CSPe is a specification language for runtime monitors that can directly
express concurrency in a bottom-up manner that composes the system from
simpler, interacting components. It includes constructs to explicitly flag
failures to the monitor, which unlike deadlocks and livelocks in conventional
process algebras, propagate globally and aborts the whole system's execution.
Although CSPe has a trace semantics along with an implementation demonstrating
acceptable performance, it lacks an operational semantics. An operational
semantics is not only more accessible than trace semantics but also
indispensable for ensuring the correctness of the implementation. Furthermore,
a process algebra like CSPe admits multiple denotational semantics appropriate
for different purposes, and an operational semantics is the basis for
justifying such semantics' integrity and relevance. In this paper, we develop
an SOS-style operational semantics for CSPe, which properly accounts for
explicit failures and will serve as a basis for further study of its
properties, its optimization, and its use in runtime verification
Several types of types in programming languages
Types are an important part of any modern programming language, but we often
forget that the concept of type we understand nowadays is not the same it was
perceived in the sixties. Moreover, we conflate the concept of "type" in
programming languages with the concept of the same name in mathematical logic,
an identification that is only the result of the convergence of two different
paths, which started apart with different aims. The paper will present several
remarks (some historical, some of more conceptual character) on the subject, as
a basis for a further investigation. The thesis we will argue is that there are
three different characters at play in programming languages, all of them now
called types: the technical concept used in language design to guide
implementation; the general abstraction mechanism used as a modelling tool; the
classifying tool inherited from mathematical logic. We will suggest three
possible dates ad quem for their presence in the programming language
literature, suggesting that the emergence of the concept of type in computer
science is relatively independent from the logical tradition, until the
Curry-Howard isomorphism will make an explicit bridge between them.Comment: History and Philosophy of Computing, HAPOC 2015. To appear in LNC
Automated Algebraic Reasoning for Collections and Local Variables with Lenses
Lenses are a useful algebraic structure for giving a unifying semantics to program variables in a variety of store models. They support efficient automated proof in the Isabelle/UTP verification framework. In this paper, we expand our lens library with (1) dynamic lenses, that support mutable indexed collections, such as arrays, and (2) symmetric lenses, that allow partitioning of a state space into disjoint local and global regions to support variable scopes. From this basis, we provide an enriched program model in Isabelle/UTP for collection variables and variable blocks. For the latter, we adopt an approach first used by Back and von Wright, and derive weakest precondition and Hoare calculi. We demonstrate several examples, including verification of insertion sor
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