Mutually Exclusive Procedures in Imperative Languages

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new language construct for imperative languages to represent mutually exclusive procedures, demonstrated through an extension of C called C^uchoo.

Contribution

It proposes a choice-conjunctive declaration statement for mutually exclusive procedures and implements it in an extended C language.

Findings

The new statement allows effective representation of mutually exclusive procedures.

C^uchoo demonstrates practical integration of the concept into existing language syntax.

The approach simplifies modeling objects with mutually exclusive behaviors.

Abstract

To represent mutually exclusive procedures, we propose a choice-conjunctive declaration statement of the form $uchoo(S,R)$ where $S, R$ are the procedure declaration statements within a module. This statement has the following semantics: request the machine to choose a successful one between $S$ and $R$. This statement is useful for representing objects with mutually exclusive procedures. We illustrate our idea via C^uchoo, an extension of the core C with a new statement.