An Adequate While-Language for Hybrid Computation

Abstract

Hybrid computation harbours discrete and continuous dynamics in the form of an entangled mixture, inherently present in various natural phenomena and in applications ranging from control theory to microbiology. The emergent behaviours bear signs of both computational and physical processes, and thus present difficulties not only in their analysis, but also in describing them adequately in a structural, well-founded way. In order to tackle these issues and, more generally, to investigate hybridness as a dedicated computational phenomenon, we introduce a while-language for hybrid computation inspired by the fine-grain call-by-value paradigm. We equip it with operational and computationally adequate denotational semantics. The latter crucially relies on a hybrid monad supporting an (Elgot) iteration operator that we developed elsewhere. As an intermediate step, we introduce a more lightweight duration semantics furnished with analogous results and based on a new duration monad that we introduce as a lightweight counterpart to the hybrid monad.