What Are Polymorphically-Typed Ambients?

Abstract: The Ambient Calculus was developed by Cardelli and Gordon as a formal framework to study issues of mobility and migrant code. We consider an Ambient Calculus where ambients transport and exchange programs rather that just inert data. We propose different senses in which such a calculus can be said to be polymorphically typed, and design accordingly a polymorphic type system for it. Our type system assigns types to embedded programs and what we call behaviors to processes; a denotational semantics of behaviors is then proposed, here called trace semantics, underlying much of the remaining analysis. We state and prove a Subject Reduction property for our polymorphically typed calculus. Based on techniques borrowed from finite automata theory, type-checking of fully type-annotated processes is shown to be decidable; the time complexity of our decision procedure is exponential (this is a worst-case in theory, arguably not encountered in practice). Our polymorphically-typed calculus is a conservative extension of the typed Ambient Calculus originally proposed by Cardelli and Gordon

Orderly Communication in the Ambient Calculus

The Ambient Calculus (henceforth, AC) was developed by Cardelli and Gordon as a formal framework to study issues of mobility and migrant code [9]. We present a type system for AC that allows the type of exchanged data within the same ambient to vary over time. Our type system assigns what we call behaviors to processes; a denotational semantics of behaviors is proposed, here called trace semantics, underlying much of the remaining analysis. We state and prove a Subject Reduction property for our typed version of AC. Based on techniques borrowed from finite automata theory, type checking of fully type-annotated processes is shown to be decidable. We show that the typed version of AC originally proposed by Cardelli and Gordon [10] can be naturally embedded into our typed version of AC

What are Polymorphically-Typed Ambients?

The Ambient Calculus was developed by Cardelli and Gordon as a formal framework to study issues of mobility and migrant code [CG98]. We consider an Ambient Calculus where ambients transport and exchange programs rather that just inert data. We propose different senses in which such a calculus can be said to be polymorphically typed, and design accordingly a polymorphic type system for it. Our type system assigns types to embedded programs and what we call behaviors to processes; a denotational semantics of behaviors is then proposed, here called trace semantics, underlying much of the remaining analysis. We state and prove a Subject Reduction property for our polymorphically-typed calculus. Based on techniques borrowed from finite automata theory, type-checking of fully type-annotated processes is shown to be decidable. Our polymorphically-typed calculus is a conservative extension of the typed Ambient Calculus originally proposed by Cardelli and Gordon [CG99]