Maude is a high-level language and a high-performance system supporting executable specification and declarative programming in rewriting logic. Since rewriting logic contains equational logic, Maude also supports equational specification and programming in its sublanguage of functional modules and theories. The underlying equational logic chosen for Maude is membership equational logic, that has sorts, subsorts, operator overloading, and partiality definable by membership and equality conditions. Rewriting logic is reflective, in the sense of being able to express its own metalevel at the object level. Reflection is systematically exploited in Maude endowing the language with powerful metaprogramming capabilities, including both user-definable module operations and declarative strategies to guide the deduction process. This paper explains and illustrates with examples the main concepts of Maude's language design, including its underlying logic, functional, system and object-oriented modules, as well as parameterized modules, theories, and views. We also explain how Maude supports reflection, metaprogramming and internal strategies. The paper outlines the principles underlying the Maude system implementation, including its semicompilation techniques. We conclude with some remarks about applications, work on a formal environment for Maude, and a mobile language extension of Maude.

One of the key goals of rewriting logic from its beginning has been to provide a semantic and logical framework in which many models of computation and languages can be naturally represented. There is by now very extensive evidence supporting the claim that rewriting logic is indeed a very flexible and simple logical and semantic framework. From a language design point of view the obvious question to ask is: how can a rewriting logic language best support logical and semantic framework applications, so that it becomes a metalanguage in which a very wide variety of logics and languages can be both semantically defined, and implemented? Our answer is: by being reflective. This paper discusses our latest language design and implementation work on Maude as a reflective metalanguage in which entire environments---including syntax definition, parsing, pretty printing, execution, and input/output---can be defined for a language or logic L of choice. 1

. Tile logic extends rewriting logic by taking into account sideeffects and rewriting synchronization. These aspects are very important when we model process calculi, because they allow us to express the dynamic interaction between processes and "the rest of the world". Since rewriting logic is the semantic basis of several language implementation efforts, an executable specification of tile systems can be obtained by mapping tile logic back into rewriting logic, in a conservative way. However, a correct rewriting implementation of tile logic requires the development of a metalayer to control rewritings, i.e., to discard computations that do not correspond to any deduction in tile logic. We show how such methodology can be applied to term tile systems that cover and extend a wide-class of SOS formats for the specification of process calculi. The well-known case-study of full CCS, where the term tile format is needed to deal with recursion (in the form of the replicator operator), is di...

Research in Software Architectures has put forward the concept of connector to express complex relationships between system components, thus facilitating the separation of coordination from computation. A system can then be understood, at a given level of abstraction, in terms of its components and the connectors that establish how they interact. However, for systems in which many interconnections exist between their components, the architectures themselves may become very complex due to the high number of connectors in place. This is especially true in the context of mobile systems in which the interconnections are, by nature, transient in the sense that, at a given instant of time, only a subset of the potential connectors are actually effective. In this paper, we formalise a notion of transient connector that allows, at any given moment, for the architecture to depict only the connectors that are active and, in this way, capture the dynamics of architectures themselves. ...