Experimenting with a Context-Aware Language

Contextual information plays an increasingly crucial role in concurrent applications in the times of mobility and pervasiveness of computing. Context-Oriented Programming languages explicitly treat this kind of information. They provide primitive constructs to adapt the behaviour of a program, depending on the evolution of its operational environment, which is affected by other programs hosted therein independently and unpredictably. We discuss these issues and the challenges they pose, reporting on our recent work on ML CoDa, a language specifically designed for adaptation and equipped with a clear formal semantics and analysis tools. We will show how applications and context interactions can be better specified, analysed and controlled, with the help of some experiments done with a preliminary implementation of ML CoDa.