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Composition of Interacting Computations

  • Chapter
Interactive Computation

Summary

The field of programming has been concerned with software composition since its very inception. Our models for software composition have brought us up to a new plateau of software complexity and composition. To tackle the challenges of composition at this level requires new models for software composition centered on interaction as a first-class concept. Interaction has been studied as an inseparable concern within concurrency theory. Curiously, however, interaction has not been seriously considered as a first-class concept in constructive models of computation.

Composition of systems out of autonomous subsystems pivots on coordination concerns that center on interaction. Coordination models and languages represent a recent approach to design and development of concurrent systems. In this chapter, we present a brief overview of coordination models and languages, followed by a framework for their classification. We then focus on a specific coordination language, called Reo, and demonstrate how it provides a powerful and expressive model for flexible composition of behavior through interaction.

Reo serves as a good example of a constructive model of computation that treats interaction as a (in fact, the only) first-class concept. It uniquely focuses on the compositional construction of connectors that enable and coordinate the interactions among the constituents in a concurrent system, without their knowledge. We show how Reo allows complex behavior in a system to emerge as a composition of primitive interactions.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Farhad Arbab

  2. Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Farhad Arbab

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  1. Farhad Arbab
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Brown University, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

    Dina Goldin  & Peter Wegner  & 

  2. Department of Computer Science, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY, 11794-4400, USA

    Scott A. Smolka

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Arbab, F. (2006). Composition of Interacting Computations. In: Goldin, D., Smolka, S.A., Wegner, P. (eds) Interactive Computation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-34874-3_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-34874-3_12

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