Programming in a context-aware language

In the times of mobility and pervasiveness of computing, contextual information plays an increasingly crucial role in applications. This kind of information becomes a first class citizen in context-oriented programming (COP) paradigm. COP languages provide primitive constructs for easily writing applications that adapt their behaviour depending on the evolution of their operational environment, namely the context. We present these new constructs, the issues and the challenges that arise, reporting on our recent work on MLCoDa. It is a declarative language specifically designed for adaptation and equipped with a clear formal semantics and analysis tools. We will discuss some experiments done with a preliminary implementation of MLCoDa. Through them we will show how applications and context interactions can be better specified, analysed and controlled.