A Semantic Model for Graphical User Interfaces

A Semantic Model for Graphical User Interfaces

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by Neelakantan R. Krishnaswami , Nick Benton

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Datum	Value	Source
TITLE	A Semantic Model for Graphical User Interfaces	SVM HeaderParse 0.2
AUTHOR NAME	Neelakantan R. Krishnaswami	SVM HeaderParse 0.2
AUTHOR AFFIL	Microsoft Research	SVM HeaderParse 0.2
AUTHOR NAME	Nick Benton	SVM HeaderParse 0.2
AUTHOR AFFIL	Microsoft Research	SVM HeaderParse 0.2
ABSTRACT	We give a denotational model for graphical user interface (GUI) programming using the Cartesian closed category of ultrametric spaces. The ultrametric structure enforces causality restrictions on reactive systems and allows well-founded recursive definitions by a generalization of guardedness. We capture the arbitrariness of user input (e.g., a user gets to decide the stream of clicks she sends to a program) by making use of the fact that the closed subsets of an ultrametric space themselves form an ultrametric space, allowing us to interpret nondeterminism with a “powerspace ” monad. Algebras for the powerspace monad yield a model of intuitionistic linear logic, which we exploit in the definition of a mixed linear/non-linear domain-specific language for writing GUI programs. The non-linear part of the language is used for writing reactive stream-processing functions whilst the linear sublanguage naturally captures the generativity and usage constraints on the various linear objects in GUIs, such as the elements of a DOM or scene graph. We have implemented this DSL as an extension to OCaml, and give examples demonstrating that programs in this style can be short and readable.	SVM HeaderParse 0.2
CITATIONS	26 found	ParsCit 1.0