A theory of reversibility for Erlang

In a reversible language, any forward computation can be undone by a finite sequence of backward steps. Reversible computing has been studied in the context of different programming languages and formalisms, where it has been used for testing and verifica- tion, among others. In this paper, we consi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of logical and algebraic methods in programming Vol. 100; pp. 71 - 97
Main Authors Lanese, Ivan, Nishida, Naoki, Palacios, Adrián, Vidal, Germán
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier Inc 01.11.2018
Elsevier
Subjects
Actor model
Computer Science
Concurrency
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Programming Languages
Reversible computation
Rollback recovery
Rollback recovery
Reversible computation
Actor model
Concurrency
reversible computation
rollback recovery
actor model
concurrency
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Summary:In a reversible language, any forward computation can be undone by a finite sequence of backward steps. Reversible computing has been studied in the context of different programming languages and formalisms, where it has been used for testing and verifica- tion, among others. In this paper, we consider a subset of Erlang, a functional and concurrent programming language based on the actor model. We present a formal semantics for reversible computation in this language and prove its main properties, including its causal consistency. We also build on top of it a rollback operator that can be used to undo the actions of a process up to a given checkpoint.
ISSN:2352-2208
DOI:10.1016/j.jlamp.2018.06.004