Traditional imperative synchronous programming languages heavily rely on a strict separation between data memory and communication signals. Signals can be shared between computational units but cannot be overwritten within a synchronous reaction cycle. Memory can be destructively updated but cannot be shared between concurrent threads. This incoherence makes traditional imperative synchronous languages cumbersome for the programmer. The recent definition of sequentially constructive synchronous languages offers an improvement. It removes the separation between data memory and communication signals and unifies both through the notion of clock synchronized shared memory . However, it still depends on global causality analyses, which precludes black-box procedural abstraction. This complicates reuse and composition of software components. This article shows how black-box procedural abstraction can be accommodated inside the sequentially constructive model of computation. We present the Sequentially Constructive Procedural Language ( SCoPL ) and its semantic theory of policy-constructive synchronous processes. SCoPL supports black-box procedural abstractions using policy interfaces to ensure that procedure calls are memory-safe and wait-free and their scheduling is determinate and causal. At the same time, a policy interface constrains the level of freedom for the implementation and subsequent refactoring of a procedure. As a result, policies enable separate compilation and composition of procedures. We present our extensions abstractly as a formal semantics for SCoPL and motivate it concretely in the context of the open-source, embedded, real-time language Blech .

Software visualization tools can improve the software development process by providing a graphical overview of source code and enhancing collaboration. We here propose a concept to automatically extract mode diagrams from Blech code, an imperative synchronous programming language for embedded, reactive and safety-critical systems. Our main findings are that the visualization is helpful to understand the stateful nature of the source code and that it can enhance the collaboration between developers. It is also found, however, that a good understanding of the precise diagram semantics meaning of the diagram elements is key. Lastly, the findings indicate that preference on different labeling options is highly subjective.

Traditional imperative synchronous programming languages heavily rely on a strict separation between data memory and communication signals. Signals can be shared between computational units but cannot be overwritten within a synchronous reaction cycle. Memory can be destructively updated but cannot be shared between concurrent threads. This incoherence makes traditional imperative synchronous languages cumbersome for the programmer. The recent definition of sequentially constructive synchronous languages offers an improvement. It removes the separation between data memory and communication signals and unifies both through the notion of clock synchronised shared memory. However, it still depends on global causality analyses which precludes procedural abstraction. This complicates reuse and composition of software components. This paper shows how procedural abstraction can be accommodated inside the sequentially constructive model of computation. We present the Sequentially Constructive Procedural Language (SCPL) and its semantic theory of policy-constructive synchronous processes. SCPL supports procedural abstractions using policy interfaces to ensure that procedure calls are memory safe, wait-free and their scheduling is determinate and causal. At the same time, a policy interface constrains the level of freedom for the implementation and subsequent refactoring of a procedure. As a result, policies enable separate compilation and composition of procedures. We present our extensions abstractly as a formal semantics for SCPL and motivate it concretely in the context of the open-source, embedded, real-time language Blech.

We discuss how separate compilation and usage of structured data can be achieved in a synchronous imperative programming language for embedded systems. Our focus is on the practical aspects of these questions regarding expressiveness in programs as well as causality analysis and code generation. The approach is illustrated by means of examples written in our new language “Blech”.

This article investigates the semantic intricacies of conditioning, a main feature in probabilistic programming. Our study is based on an extension of the imperative probabilistic guarded command language pGCL with conditioning. We provide a weakest precondition (wp) semantics and an operational semantics. To deal with possibly diverging program behavior, we consider liberal preconditions. We show that diverging program behavior plays a key role when defining conditioning. We establish that weakest preconditions coincide with conditional expected rewards in Markov chains—the operational semantics—and that the wp-semantics conservatively extends the existing semantics of pGCL (without conditioning). An extension of these results with nondeterminism turns out to be problematic: although an operational semantics using Markov decision processes is rather straightforward, we show that providing an inductive wp-semantics in this setting is impossible. Finally, we present two program transformations that eliminate conditioning from any program. The first transformation hoists conditioning while updating the probabilistic choices in the program, while the second transformation replaces conditioning—in the same vein as rejection sampling—by a program with loops. In addition, we present a last program transformation that replaces an independent identically distributed loop with conditioning.