Reo is an interaction-centric model of concurrency for compositional
specification of communication and coordination protocols. Formal verification
tools exist to ensure correctness and compliance of protocols specified in Reo,
which can readily be (re)used in different applications, or composed into more
complex protocols. Recent benchmarks show that compiling such high-level Reo
specifications produces executable code that can compete with or even beat the
performance of hand-crafted programs written in languages such as C or Java
using conventional concurrency constructs.
The original declarative graphical syntax of Reo does not support intuitive
constructs for parameter passing, iteration, recursion, or conditional
specification. This shortcoming hinders Reo's uptake in large-scale practical
applications. Although a number of Reo-inspired syntax alternatives have
appeared in the past, none of them follows the primary design principles of
Reo: a) declarative specification; b) all channel types and their sorts are
user-defined; and c) channels compose via shared nodes. In this paper, we offer
a textual syntax for Reo that respects these principles and supports flexible
parameter passing, iteration, recursion, and conditional specification. In
on-going work, we use this textual syntax to compile Reo into target languages
such as Java, Promela, and Maude.Comment: In Proceedings MeTRiD 2018, arXiv:1806.0933