Jean-Pierre Banatre (EDT), Pascal Fradet (EDT), Jean-Louis Giavitto (EDT), Olivier Michel (EDT) Unconventional Programming Paradigms

Annotation

Nowadays, developers have to face the proliferation of hardware and software environments, the increasing demands of the users, the growing number of p- grams and the sharing of information, competences and services thanks to the generalization ofdatabasesandcommunication networks. Aprogramisnomore a monolithic entity conceived, produced and ?nalized before being used. A p- gram is now seen as an open and adaptive frame, which, for example, can - namically incorporate services not foreseen by the initial designer. These new needs call for new control structures and program interactions. Unconventionalapproachestoprogramminghavelongbeendevelopedinv- iousnichesandconstituteareservoirofalternativewaystofacetheprogramming languages crisis. New models of programming (e. g. , bio-inspired computing, - ti?cialchemistry,amorphouscomputing,. . . )arealsocurrentlyexperiencinga renewed period of growth as they face speci?c needs and new application - mains. These approaches provide new abstractions and notations or develop new ways of interacting with programs. They are implemented by embedding new sophisticated data structures in a classical programming model (API), by extending an existing language with new constructs (to handle concurrency, - ceptions, open environments, . . . ), by conceiving new software life cycles and program executions (aspect weaving, run-time compilation) or by relying on an entire new paradigm to specify a computation. They are inspired by theoretical considerations (e. g. , topological, algebraic or logical foundations), driven by the domain at hand (domain-speci?c languages like PostScript, musical notation, animation, signal processing, etc. ) or by metaphors taken from various areas (quantum computing, computing with molecules, information processing in - ological tissues, problem solving from nature, ethological and social modeling).