Lustre (programming language)
Lustre is a formally defined, declarative, and synchronous dataflow programming language for programming reactive systems. It began as a research project in the early 1980s. A formal presentation of the language can be found in the 1991 Proceedings of the IEEE.[1] In 1993 it progressed to practical, industrial use in a commercial product as the core language of the industrial environment SCADE, developed by Esterel Technologies. It is now used for critical control software in aircraft,[2] helicopters, and nuclear power plants.
Structure of Lustre programs
A Lustre program is a series of node definitions, written as:
node foo(a : bool) returns (b : bool); let b = not a; tel
Where foo
is the name of the node, a
is the name of the single input of this node and b
is the name of the single output.
In this example the node foo
returns the negation of its input a
, which is the expected result.
Inner variables
Additional internal variables can be declared as follows:
node Nand(X,Y: bool) returns (Z: bool); var U: bool; let U = X and Y; Z = not U; tel
Note: The equations order doesn't matter, the order of lines U = X and Y;
and Z = not U;
doesn't change the result.
Special operators
pre p | Returns the previous value of p |
p -> q | Set p as the initial value of the expression q |
Examples
Edge detection
node Edge (X : bool) returns (E : bool); let E = false -> X and not pre X; tel
See also
- Esterel
- SIGNAL (another dataflow-oriented synchronous language)
- Synchronous programming language
- Dataflow programming
References
- N. Halbwachs et al. The Synchronous Data Flow Programming Language LUSTRE. In Proc. IEEE 1991 Vol. 79, No. 9. Accessed 17 March 2014.
- "SCADE Success Stories". Retrieved 8 June 2013.