Specifying the PLAN Network Programming Langauge

✍ Scribed by Pankaj Kakkar; Michael Hicks; Jon Moore; Carl A. Gunter

• Book ID: 104445399
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 870 KB
• Volume: 26
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1571-0661
• DOI: 10.1016/s1571-0661(05)80285-3

✦ Synopsis

We discuss how the speci cation of the PLAN programming language supports the design objectives of the language. The speci cation aims to provide a mathematically precise operational semantics that can serve as a standard for implementing interpreters and portable programs. The semantics should also support proofs of key properties of PLAN that would hold of all conformant implementations. This paper discusses two s u c h properties. (1) Type checking is required, but interpreters are given signi cant exibility a b o u t when types are checked the speci cation must support a clear description of the possible behaviors of a network of conformant implementations. (2) It is essential to have guarantees about how PLAN programs use global resources, but the speci cation must be exible about extensions in the network service layer. We illustrate on of kind of issue that will arise in using to speci cation to prove properties of the network based on the choice of services.