Idel Stream Algebra

• Authors: Bernhard Möller
• Venue: Proceedings of the ESPRIT Working Group 8533 on Prospects for Hardware Foundations: NADA - New Hardware Design Methods, Survey Chapters
• Year: 1998

We provide some mathematical properties of behaviours of systems, where the individual elements of a behaviour are modeled by ideals, ie. downward closed directed subsets of a suitable partial order. It is well-known that the associated ideal completion provides a simple way of constructing algebraic cpos. An ideal can be viewed as a set of consistent finite or compact approximations of an object which itself may be infinite. A special case is the domain of streams where the finite approximations are the finite prefixes of a stream.We introduce a special way of characterising behaviours through sets of relevant approximations. This is a generalisation of the technique we have used earlier for the case of streams. Given a set P 驴 M of a partial order (M,驴), we define ide P:= {Q驴 : Q 驴 P directedg}, where Q驴:= {x 驴 M : 驴 y 驴 Q : x 驴 y} is the downward closure of Q. So ide P is the set of all ideals "spanned" by directed subsets of P. We prove a number of distributivity and monotonicity laws for ide and related operators. They are the basis for correct refinement of specifications into implementations. Various small examples illustrate that the operators lead to very concise while quite clear specifications.Finally, we give a characterisation of safety and liveness and generalise the Alpern/Schneider decomposition lemma to arbitrary domains.An extended example concerns the specification and transformational development of an asynchronous bounded queue.