The Mathematical Specification of the Statebox Language

TL;DR

This paper provides a rigorous mathematical foundation for the Statebox programming language, ensuring its consistency and correctness by formally tying together various theoretical structures.

Contribution

It introduces a formal mathematical specification that underpins the Statebox language, enhancing its reliability and facilitating auditing and understanding.

Findings

Mathematical framework ensures language consistency

Formal specification guides implementation process

Supports auditing and verification of the language

Abstract

This document defines the mathematical backbone of the Statebox programming language. In the simplest way possible, Statebox can be seen as a clever way to tie together different theoretical structures to maximize their benefits and limit their downsides. Since consistency and correctness are central requisites for our language, it became clear from the beginning that such tying could not be achieved by just hacking together different pieces of code representing implementations of the structures we wanted to leverage: Rigorous mathematics is employed to ensure both conceptual consistency of the language and reliability of the code itself. The mathematics presented here is what guided the implementation process, and we deemed very useful to release it to the public to help people wanting to audit our work to better understand the code itself.