Checks and balances: constraint solving without surprises in object-constraint programming languages

Felgentreff, Tim; Millstein, Todd; Borning, Alan; Hirschfeld, Robert

doi:10.1145/2814270.2814311

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…This constraint imperative language uses constraints to simulate imperative constructs such as updating, assignment and object identity. Inspired by Kaleidoscope, the language Babelsberg (Felgentreff et al, 2015) was developed that integrates constraints with object-oriented systems. A Ruby extension has been developed wherein programmers could add constraints to existing Ruby programs in incremental steps.…”

Section: Constraint-based and Related Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal constrained objects for modelling neuronal dynamics

Nair

Kannimoola

Jayaraman

et al. 2018

PeerJ Computer Science

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Background: Several new programming languages and technologies have emerged in the past few decades in order to ease the task of modelling complex systems. Modelling the dynamics of complex systems requires various levels of abstractions and reductive measures in representing the underlying behaviour. This also often requires making a trade-off between how realistic a model should be in order to address the scientific questions of interest and the computational tractability of the model. Methods: In this paper, we propose a novel programming paradigm, called temporal constrained objects, which facilitates a principled approach to modelling complex dynamical systems. Temporal constrained objects are an extension of constrained objects with a focus on the analysis and prediction of the dynamic behaviour of a system. The structural aspects of a neuronal system are represented using objects, as in object-oriented languages, while the dynamic behaviour of neurons and synapses are modelled using declarative temporal constraints. Computation in this paradigm is a process of constraint satisfaction within a time-based simulation. Results: We identified the feasibility and practicality in automatically mapping different kinds of neuron and synapse models to the constraints of temporal constrained objects. Simple neuronal networks were modelled by composing circuit components, implicitly satisfying the internal constraints of each component and interface constraints of the composition. Simulations show that temporal constrained objects provide significant conciseness in the formulation of these models. The underlying computational engine employed here automatically finds the solutions to the problems stated, reducing the code for modelling and simulation control. All examples reported in this paper have been programmed and successfully tested using the prototype language called TCOB. The code along with the programming environment are available at http://github.com/compneuro/ TCOB_Neuron. Discussion: Temporal constrained objects provide powerful capabilities for modelling the structural and dynamic aspects of neural systems. Capabilities of the constraint programming paradigm, such as declarative specification, the ability to express partial information and non-directionality, and capabilities of the object-oriented paradigm especially aggregation and inheritance, make this paradigm the right candidate for complex systems and computational modelling studies. With the advent of multi-core

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Section: Constraint-based and Related Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal constrained objects for modelling neuronal dynamics

Nair

Kannimoola

Jayaraman

et al. 2018

PeerJ Computer Science

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“…Constraint-oriented programming systems, including Sketch-Pad [36] and ThingLab [6] among others [30,13,27], allow users to specify declarative relationships that augment procedural programs. Constraint solvers (e.g.…”

Section: Constraint-oriented Programmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semi-Automated SVG Programming via Direct Manipulation

Hempel

Chugh

2016

Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

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Direct manipulation interfaces provide intuitive and interactive features to a broad range of users, but they often exhibit two limitations: the built-in features cannot possibly cover all use cases, and the internal representation of the content is not readily exposed. We believe that if direct manipulation interfaces were to (a) use general-purpose programs as the representation format, and (b) expose those programs to the user, then experts could customize these systems in powerful new ways and non-experts could enjoy some of the benefits of programmable systems.In recent work, we presented a prototype SVG editor called SKETCH-N-SKETCH that offered a step towards this vision. In that system, the user wrote a program in a general-purpose lambda-calculus to generate a graphic design and could then directly manipulate the output to indirectly change design parameters (i.e. constant literals) in the program in real-time during the manipulation. Unfortunately, the burden of programming the desired relationships rested entirely on the user.In this paper, we design and implement new features for SKETCH-N-SKETCH that assist in the programming process itself. Like typical direct manipulation systems, our extended SKETCH-N-SKETCH now provides GUI-based tools for drawing shapes, relating shapes to each other, and grouping shapes together. Unlike typical systems, however, each tool carries out the user's intention by transforming their general-purpose program. This novel, semi-automated programming workflow allows the user to rapidly create highlevel, reusable abstractions in the program while at the same time retaining direct manipulation capabilities. In future work, our approach may be extended with more graphic design features or realized for other application domains.

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“…The semantic rules presented here are an extension to the semantics of Babelsberg/Objects, presented in the companion technical report to [7]. This appendix should be read as an additional chapter after that companion report.…”

Section: Appendixmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In prior work, we experimented with an extended Squeak/Smalltalk based prototype implementation of the Babelsberg design -Babelsberg/S -to support operations on collections of objects [9]. In this paper, we present a general design from this prototype implementation, as well as semantic rules to supplement the existing Babelsberg semantics [7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…[collection allDifferent] alwaysTrue.The formal design of Babelsberg indeed does support such methods, but only for solving in the forward direction, that is, to execute them and use the result as a constant[7]. In this case, solving in the forward direction would be of little use, however, since if the result of the call to allDifferent is not already true, there is nothing the system can do, since the result when treated as a constant is simply false.Supporting collections in constraints more directly is thus useful in this application, and more generally in any application c 2016 Information Processing Society of Japan…”

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confidence: 99%

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Declaring Constraints on Object-oriented Collections

Felgentreff

Hirschfeld

Graber

et al. 2016

Journal of Information Processing

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Logic puzzles such as Sudoku are described by a set of properties that a valid solution must have. Constraints are a useful technique to describe and solve for such properties. However, constraints are less suited to express imperative interactions in a user interface for logic puzzles, a domain that is more readily expressed in the objectoriented paradigm. Object constraint programming provides a design to integrate constraints with dynamic, objectoriented programming languages. It allows developers to encode multi-way constraints over objects using existing, object-oriented abstractions. These constraints are automatically maintained at run-time. In this paper we present an application of this design to logic puzzles in the Squeak/Smalltalk programming environment, as well as an extension of the design and the formal semantics of Babelsberg to allow declaring constraints using the imperative collection API provided in Squeak. We argue that our implementation facilitates creating applications that use imperative construction of user interfaces and mutable program state as well as constraint satisfaction techniques for different parts of the system. The main advantage of our approach is that it moves the burden to maintain constraints from the developer to the runtime environment, while keeping the development experience close to the purely object-oriented approach.

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Checks and balances: constraint solving without surprises in object-constraint programming languages

Cited by 9 publications

References 10 publications

Temporal constrained objects for modelling neuronal dynamics

Temporal constrained objects for modelling neuronal dynamics

Semi-Automated SVG Programming via Direct Manipulation

Declaring Constraints on Object-oriented Collections

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