Management of Change in Declarative Languages

摘要

Due to the high degree of interconnectedness of formal mathematical statements and theories, human authors often have difficulties anticipating and tracking the effects of a change in large bodies of symbolic mathematical knowledge. Therefore, the automation of change management is often desirable. But while computers can in principle detect and propagate changes automatically, this process must take the semantics of the underlying mathematical formalism into account. Therefore, concrete management of change solutions are difficult to realize. The Mmt language was designed as a generic declarative language that captures universal structural features while avoiding a commitment to a particular formalism. Therefore, it provides a promising framework for the systematic study of changes in declarative languages. We leverage this framework by providing a generic change management solution at the Mmt level, which can be instantiated for arbitrary specific languages.