Design and Implementation of Context Calculus in the GIPSY Environment

GIPSY is a platform providing a framework for the compilation and execution of programs written in intensional programming languages of the Lucid family. While maintaining its use of intensionality, over the years, Lucid constantly underwent changes in its syntax, and its semantics is getting more and more generalized. Throughout this hectic evolution of the language, various systems for the evaluation of Lucid programs were developed. Due to lack of ability to adapt to the syntax and semantic changes of the language, all of them met with doom as new evolutions of the language were proposed. Set in this evolutionary aspect of Lucid, GIPSY aims at easing the development of the Lucid family of intensional programming languages by providing a common system into which variants of Lucid can be compiled and executed and, more interestingly, developed in the future. One of the latest evolutions of Lucid is the language Lucx, permitting the explicit use of contexts as first-class atomic entities. This paper presents the integration of Lucx's context calculus into GIPSY. We define the notion of context according to Lucx, its syntax and semantics, as well as operators on such contexts. We then present how context entities have been abstracted into implementation classes and embedded into GIPSY.