Programming reactive systems using dataflow
Date
1990
Authors
Vempati, Naganjaneya Sarma
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
RLUCID, presented in this thesis as a programming language for real-time applications, is an extension of LUCID, a dataflow language. The notion of time enters the language through the timestamped streams: LUCID streams of values together with a corresponding stream of timestamps . Two additional operators, Which and II (read 'synchro') are introduced to exploit the timing information without developing uncausal relations.
RLUCID is sufficiently expressive. It is employed in providing an alternative semantics of LUSTRE, a real-time dataflow language, more intuitively. Further, a solution to an important problem of defining an interface to a LUSTRE program, is presented. Traditionally written in 'C', this interface maps the inherently asynchronous environment to the synchronous kernel generated from a LUSTRE program. Proposed here is a new language, APRIL, to concisely define such interfaces in a synchronous manner. The primitive operators of APRIL are defined by RLUCID functions.