A language of relations and combining forms is presented in which to describe both the behaviour of circuits and the specifications which they must meet. We illustrate a design method that starts by selecting representations for the values on which a circuit operates, and derive the circuit from these representations by a process of refinement entirely within the language. Formal methods have always been used in circuit design. It would be unthinkable to attempt to design combinational circuits without using Boolean algebra. This means that circuit designers, unlike programmers, already use mathematical tools as a matter of course. It also means that we have a good basis on which to build higher level formal design methods. Encouraged by these observations, we have been investigating the application of formal program development techniques to circuit design. We view circuit design as the transformation of a program describing the required behaviour into an equivalent program that is s...

. We present an overview of a prototype system based on a functional language for developing regular array circuits. The features of a simulator, floorplanner and expression transformer are discussed and illustrated. INTRODUCTION Implementing algorithms on a regular array of processors has many advantages. Besides offering an efficient realisation of parallel structures, regular patterns of interconnections also provide an opportunity for simplifying their description and their development. Various approaches for regular array design have been proposed; examples include methods based on dependence graphs [5], recurrence equations [14], and algebraic techniques [16]. This paper presents an overview of a prototype system for regular array development. The system is based on ¯FP [15], a functional language with mechanisms for abstracting spatial and temporal iteration. These abstractions result in a succinct and precise notation for specifying designs. Moreover, the explicit representat...

This thesis is about the calculational approach to programming, in which one derives programs from specifications. One such calculational paradigm is Ruby, the relational calculus developed by Jones and Sheeran for describing and designing circuits. We identify two shortcomings with derivations made using Ruby. The first is that the notion of a program being an implementation of a specification has never been made precise. The second is to do with types. Fundamental to the use of type information in deriving programs is the idea of having types as special kinds of programs. In Ruby, types are partial equivalence relations (pers). Unfortunately, manipulating some formulae involving types has proved difficult within Ruby. In particular, the preconditions of the `induction' laws that are much used within program derivation often work out to be assertions about types; such assertions have typically been verified either by informal arguments or by using predicate calculus, rather than by ap...

The notion of functionality is not cast in stone, but depends upon what we have as types in our language. With partial equivalence relations (pers) as types we show that the functional relations are precisely those satisfying the simple equation f = f ffi f [ ffi f , where " [ " is the relation converse operator. This article forms part of "A calculational theory of pers as types" [1]. 1 Introduction In calculational programming, programs are derived from specifications by a process of algebraic manipulation. Perhaps the best known calculational paradigm is the Bird--Meertens formalism, or to use its more colloquial name, Squiggol [2]. Programs in the Squiggol style work upon trees, lists, bags and sets, the so--called Boom hierarchy. The framework was uniformly extended to cover arbitrary recursive types by Malcolm in [3], by means of the F--algebra paradigm of type definition, and resulting catamorphic programming style. More recently, Backhouse et al [4] have made a further ...

We present a programming paradigm based upon the notion of binary relations as programs, and partial equivalence relations (pers) as types. Our method is calculational , in that programs are derived from specifications by algebraic manipulation. Working with relations as programs generalises the functional paradigm, admiting non--determinism and the use of relation converse. Working with pers as types, we have a more general notion than normal of what constitutes an element of a type; this leads to a more general class of functional relations, the so--called difunctional relations. Our basic method of defining types is to take the fixpoint of a relator , a simple strengthening of the categorical notion of a functor. Further new types can be made by imposing laws and restrictions on the constructors of other types. Having pers as types is fundamental to our treatment of types with laws. Contents 1 Introduction 2 2 Relational calculus 4 2.1 Powerset lattice structure : : : : : : : : :...

Ruby is a relational language for describing hardware circuits. In the past, programming tools existed which only catered for the execution of functional Ruby expressions rather than the complete set of relational ones. In this paper, we develop an implementation of Ruby in Prolog---a higher-order logic programming language---allowing the execution of arbitrary, relational Ruby programs. 1 Introduction Programming problems can be tackled by specifying a program's behaviour in an abstract mathematical specification and then, through the application of some appropriate calculus, converting this into an efficient and implementable program. Until recently, the art of deriving computer programs from specification has been performed equationally in a functional calculus [Bir87]. However, it has become evident that a relational calculus affords us a greater degree of expression and flexibility in both specification and proof since a relational calculus naturally captures the notions of non-d...