Interactive Programming of Reactive Systems

ReactiveML is a synchronous reactive extension of the general purpose programming language OCaml. It allows to program reactive systems such as video games or simulators. This paper presents rmltop, the ReactiveML counterpart of the OCaml toplevel. This toplevel allows a programmer to interactively write ReactiveML programs which are type-checked, compiled and loaded on the fly. The user can then progressively run concurrent processes and observe the interactions between them. The main strength of rmltop is that all valid ReactiveML expressions are accepted in the toplevel with the same semantics as in the compiler. This allows to use the ReactiveML toplevel as a debugger. Furthermore, the interpreted code is as efficient as if it was compiled. Moreover, a toplevel interpreter being itself a reactive system, another originality of rmltop is its own implementation in ReactiveML which makes it relatively light.

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