MGS, a declarative spatial computing programming language

cote interne IRCAM: Giavitto11fNone / NoneNational audienceWe sketch the rationals of the MGS programming language. MGS is an experimental programming language developed to study the application of several spatial computing concepts to the specification and simulation of dynamical systems with a dynamical struc- ture. MGS extends the notion of rewriting by considering more general structure than terms. The basic computation step in MGS replaces in a topological collection A, some subcollection B, by another topological collection C. A topological collection is a set of element structured by a neighborhood relationships describing an underlying space rep- resenting a data structure or constraints that must be fulfilled by the computation. This process proposes a unified view on several computational mechanisms initially inspired by biological or chemical processes (Gamma and the CHAM, Lindenmayer systems, Paun systems and cellular automata)