From: Konstantinos Tourlas <kxt@dcs.ed.ac.uk>
To: categories@mta.ca
Subject: Re: statecharts and categories
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 11:49:41 +0000 (GMT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <14993.2133.143263.322554@april.dcs.ed.ac.uk> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <3A8A8F1F.E49648BE@info.unine.ch>
Amiguet Matthieu writes:
> I'm wondering if there has been any work in formalizing statecharts [1]
> in categorical terms.
Currently John Power and myself are involved in providing an algebraic
foundation (in category-theoretic terms) of higraphs, the "visual
formalism" [1] which underlie Statecharts. On this basis, we are
adding more features in an attempt to study a large subset of the
Statecharts language.
In brief, our approach is to regard higraphs as graphs in Poset, the
category of partially ordered sets and monotone functions. Our main
results so far pertain to operations underpinning the semantics of
Statecharts and the concept of zooming described by Harel in
[1]. Technical details will appear soon in my web page:
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/~kxt
More generally, our interests are in studying domain-specific
programming and specification languages which have a strong
diagrammatic component. Statecharts present a most interesting case
for study, as they contain a multitude of interacting diagrammatic
features and support practically important operations such as
zooming. Part of our objective is to evaluate how the different
features blend together, in an attempt to research good design
principles for the kind of diagrammatic languages used in computing.
> If not, do you know of an other algebraic
> description of this specification language?
I know of a paper by Uselton and Smolka, but which does not use
categories:
"A Compositional Semantics for Statecharts using Labeled Transition
Systems", by A. Uselton, S. Smolka, available online at:
http://www.di.ufpe.br/~lrl/statecharts_js.html
> Also, it seems to me that the operationnal semantic STATEMATE of
> Statecharts as described in [2] is very coalgebraic in nature. Did
> anybody write something about this?
I'm afraid I do not know of any such work. However, your view of
STATEMATE semantics seems most interesting. Please feel free to email
me (kxt@dcs.ed.ac.uk) or John (ajp@dcs.ed.ac.uk) for a more detailed
techical discussion on this subject or any of the above.
[1] D. Harel, On Visual Formalisms, Communications of the ACM, 31(5), 1988.
--
Konstantinos Tourlas
Tel. : 0131-650-5162 Rm 1404, JCMB, The University of Edinburgh,
e-mail : kxt@dcs.ed.ac.uk King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ UK
prev parent reply other threads:[~2001-02-19 11:49 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2001-02-14 13:58 Amiguet Matthieu
2001-02-19 11:49 ` Konstantinos Tourlas [this message]
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=14993.2133.143263.322554@april.dcs.ed.ac.uk \
--to=kxt@dcs.ed.ac.uk \
--cc=categories@mta.ca \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).