ASPfun: A Functional and Distributed Object Calculus Semantics, Type-system, and Formalization

Description

Several paradigms exist for distributed computing, this paper tries to provide a sound foundation for autonomous objects communicating in a very structured way. We define ASPfun, a calculus of functional objects, behaving autonomously, and communicating by a request-reply mechanism: requests are method calls handled asynchronously, futures represent awaited results for requests, and replies return the result of a request to an object that holds the corresponding future. This report first presents the ASPfun calculus and its semantics. Secondly we provide a type system for ASPfun, which ensure the ``progress'' property: while there is a request that is not reduced to a value, the computation can continue. ASPfun and its properties have been formalized and proved using the Isabelle theorem prover.

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