A Calculus for Reasoning about Software Components

Achermann, Franz; Nierstrasz, Oscar (2005). A Calculus for Reasoning about Software Components. Theoretical Computer Science, 331(2-3), pp. 367-396. Elsevier 10.1016/j.tcs.2004.09.022

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Although the term ``software component'' has become commonplace, there is no universally accepted definition of the term, nor does there exist a common foundation for specifying various kinds of components and their compositions. We propose such a foundation. The Piccola Calculus is a process calculus, based on the asynchronous pi-calculus, extended with explicit namespaces. The calculus is high-level, rather than minimal, and is consequently convenient for expressing and reasoning about software components, and different styles of composition. We motivate and present the calculus, and outline how it is used to specify the semantics of Piccola, a small composition language. We demonstrate how the calculus can be used to simplify compositions by partial evaluation, and we briefly outline some other applications of the calculus to reasoning about compositional styles.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

08 Faculty of Science > Institute of Computer Science (INF)
08 Faculty of Science > Institute of Computer Science (INF) > Software Composition Group (SCG) [discontinued]

UniBE Contributor:

Nierstrasz, Oscar

Subjects:

000 Computer science, knowledge & systems
500 Science > 510 Mathematics

ISSN:

0304-3975

Publisher:

Elsevier

Language:

English

Submitter:

Anja Ebeling

Date Deposited:

30 Oct 2017 12:29

Last Modified:

11 Apr 2024 16:11

Publisher DOI:

10.1016/j.tcs.2004.09.022

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.104366

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/104366

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