Functional reactive types

Abstract

Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is an approach to streaming data with a pure functional semantics as time-indexed values. In previous work, we showed that Linear-time Temporal Logic (LTL) can be used as a type system for discrete-time FRP, and that functional reactive primitives perform two roles: as combinators for building streams of data, and as proof rules for constructive LTL. In this paper, we add a third role, by showing that FRP combinators can be used to define streams of types, and that these functional reactive types can be viewed both as a constructive temporal logic, and as the types for functional reactive programs. As an application of functional reactive types, we show that past-time LTL (pLTL) can be extended with FRP to get a logic pLTL+FRP. This logic is expressed as streams of boolean expressions, and so bounded satisfiability of pLTL can be translated to Satisfiability Modulo Theory (SMT). Thus, pLTL+FRP can be used as a constraint language for problems which mix properties of data with temporal properties.