Foundations of Total Functional Data-Flow Programming

Baltasar Trancón y Widemann
(Ilmenau University of Technology)
Markus Lepper
(<semantics/> GmbH)

The field of declarative stream programming (discrete time, clocked synchronous, modular, data-centric) is divided between the data-flow graph paradigm favored by domain experts, and the functional reactive paradigm favored by academics. In this paper, we describe the foundations of a framework for unifying functional and data-flow styles that differs from FRP proper in significant ways: It is based on set theory to match the expectations of domain experts, and the two paradigms are reduced symmetrically to a low-level middle ground, with strongly compositional semantics. The design of the framework is derived from mathematical first principles, in particular coalgebraic coinduction and a standard relational model of stateful computation. The abstract syntax and semantics introduced here constitute the full core of a novel stream programming language.

In Paul Levy and Neel Krishnaswami: Proceedings 5th Workshop on Mathematically Structured Functional Programming (MSFP 2014), Grenoble, France, 12 April 2014, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 153, pp. 143–167.
Published: 5th June 2014.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.153.10 bibtex PDF
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