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A Reversible Semantics for Erlang

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Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10184))

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Abstract

In a reversible language, any forward computation can be undone by a finite sequence of backward steps. Reversible computing has been studied in the context of different programming languages and formalisms, where it has been used for debugging and for enforcing fault-tolerance, among others. In this paper, we consider a subset of Erlang, a concurrent language based on the actor model, and formally introduce a semantics for reversible computation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to define a reversible semantics for Erlang.

This work has been partially supported by the EU (FEDER) and the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) under grants TIN2013-44742-C4-1-R and TIN2016-76843-C4-1-R, by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant PROMETEO-II/2015/013 (SmartLogic), and by COST Action IC1405 on Reversible Computation - extending horizons of computing.

Partially supported by the EU (FEDER) and the Spanish programs Ayudas para contratos predoctorales para la formación de doctores and Ayudas a la movilidad predoctoral para la realización de estancias breves en centros de I+D, MINECO (SEIDI), under FPI grants BES-2014-069749 and EEBB-I-16-11469.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    E.g., in the semantics of [21], at the expression level, the semantics of an expression containing a receive statement is, in principle, infinitely branching, since their formulation allows for an infinite number of possible queues and selected messages.

  2. 2.

    Note that we use the notation \(\lceil \ldots \rceil \) to explicitly denote that a process is frozen, though it is not really necessary since no transition rule would be applicable anyway.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ivan Lanese and the anonymous reviewers for many useful suggestions to improve this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, 4648603, Japan

    Naoki Nishida

  2. MiST, DSIC, Universitat Politècnica de València, Camino de Vera, s/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain

    Adrián Palacios & Germán Vidal

Authors
  1. Naoki Nishida
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  2. Adrián Palacios
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  3. Germán Vidal
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Germán Vidal .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. IMDEA Software Institute and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Manuel V Hermenegildo

  2. IMDEA Software Institute and CSIC, Madrid, Spain

    Pedro Lopez-Garcia

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Nishida, N., Palacios, A., Vidal, G. (2017). A Reversible Semantics for Erlang. In: Hermenegildo, M., Lopez-Garcia, P. (eds) Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation. LOPSTR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10184. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63139-4_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63139-4_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63138-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63139-4

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