The Essence of Event-Driven Programming

Event-driven programming is based on a natural abstraction: an event is a computation that can eventually return a value. This paper exploits the intuition relating events and time by drawing a Curry-Howard correspondence between a functional event-driven programming language and a linear-time temporal logic. In this logic, the eventually proposition ♦A describes the type of events, and Girard’s linear logic describes the effectful and concurrent nature of the programs. The correspondence reveals many interesting insights into the nature of eventdriven programming, including a generalization of selective choice for synchronizing events, and an implementation in terms of callbacks where ♦A is just ¬ ¬A. Digital Object Identifier 10.4230/LIPIcs...