Formula choice calculus

Abstract

The choice calculus is a simple metalanguage and associated theory that has been successfully applied to several problems of interest to the feature-oriented software development community. The formal presentation of the choice calculus essentially restricts variation points, called choices, to vary based on the inclusion or not of a single feature, while in practice variation points may depend on several features. Therefore, in both theoretical applications of the choice calculus, and in tools inspired by the choice calculus, the syntax of choices has often been generalized to depend on an arbitrary propositional formula of features. The purpose of this paper is to put this syntactic generalization on more solid footing by also generalizing the associated theory. Specifically, after defining the syntax and denotational semantics of the formula choice calculus (FCC), we define and prove the soundness of a syntactic equivalence relation on FCC expressions. This effort validates previous work which has implicitly assumed the soundness of rules in the equivalence relation, and also reveals several rules that are specific to FCC. Finally, we describe some further generalizations to FCC and their limits.