The IOP Model of Interoperation as a Basis for Developing Interactive Maude Applications

In this paper we describe the IOP model of interoperation and its use in developing interactive applications. Using this as a basis we have developed the IMaude library of modules for defining interactive applications based on the Rewriting Logic language Maude. This is an important step towards making Maude specifications more accessible to non-experts, and thus advancing the possibility for formal executable specifications to have more impact. The IOP interoperation model is asynchronous message passing following the actor model of distributed computation. The IOP framework provides several built in actors, including an actor that supports interactive visualization using the JLambda language. There are two aspects to developing an interactive tool using the IOP framework: (1) adapting input/output to allow the tool to communicate as an IOP actor; and (2) specifying and programming an appropriate actor-like behavior for the tool. For the Maude actor, (1) is the Maude wrapper that