A unified framework for control structures in interactive software

Stéphane Chatty (1)

1 ENAC - Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile

Control structures such as event passing, state machines and data flows help programmers express the behavior of interactive software. But used alone they cannot describe systems in their totality, and when combined with standard control structures their semantics becomes unclear. This article proposes a set of requirements for unifiying all control structures in a general framework. It then proposes a candidate framework in which all software components can be described by processes and their interactions by process couplings. Couplings are the basic block from which control structure such as state machines, data flow connectors, sequences and functions can be derived. We show how a wide variety of programming situations and architecture patterns can be described by combining these control structures. The power of expression and interoperability provided unlock possibilities such as interaction-oriented programming languages.

Mots clés: process; state machine; data flow; control structure; programming language; interactive software

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]; Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Stéphane Chatty. A unified framework for control structures in interactive software. 2018. ⟨hal-01800741⟩