Friday 31 January 2014

A Comedy of Errors!

Shakespeare is a constant source of inspiration. As Aristotle touched and influenced all sides of what is now modern science, so Shakespeare did navigate so masterfully through all the meanders and rivulets of the human soul that he's become a touchstone we can hardly fail to refer to in any work of art.

And not just art, actually!

Some years ago I was writing my doctoral thesis on resilience of distributed software systems. The main "character in the play", so to say, was a programming language for the specification of error recovery tasks. The idea was that, when an error is detected in a software program, this would trigger the execution of a second program meant specifically to deal with the errors found in the first one. The second program was written in the programming language I conceived, designed, and implemented during my doctoral studies, which I called ARIEL. ARIEL code was a series of "guarded actions", namely commands that would only be executed when a condition (the "guard") was verified as being true. The hidden side of ARIEL was the so-called Backbone (BB), a system of agents watching the user program and its own components and gathering information about what the user program was having problems with: exceptions, missed deadlines, crashes — much of the whole lot. The general scheme was as follows:

As I said already, programs in ARIEL are given by one or more "guarded actions". An example of those actions is given below:

IF [ FAULTY TASK {MYTASK} ]
THEN
     RESTART TASK {MYTASK}
FI .
I wrote a translator, called "art", to convert lists of guarded actions like the one above into a new program, equivalent in meaning but more suited for being quickly interpreted by a machine ("art" stands for ARiel Translator, natcherly). The new program was called RCODE ("recovery code"). If something went wrong in the main program (for instance a distributed application including a task called "MYTASK"), and if the BB would become the wiser of the bad news, then the BB would start a new special task: the ARIEL interpreter. This task would execute the ARIEL RCODE and eventually bump in the (RCODE translation of the) above IF statements. Condition "FAULTY TASK {MYTASK}" would be found true and as a result TASK {MYTASK} would be restarted. Simple strategy, innit?

ARIEL could do more complex things than that of course. For instance it could manage groups of tasks and make use of special characters to represent subsets of a group of task. As an example, in the following guarded action "STOP TASK@" means "stop of faulty tasks in the current group", in this case group "MY_Group", while "SEND {DEGRADE} TASK~" means "send the DEGRADE message to all the non-faulty tasks in the current group":

IF [ FAULTY (GROUP{My_Group}) ]
THEN
       STOP TASK@
       SEND {DEGRADE} TASK∼
FI

Okay so by now you will be asking "but what ARIEL has to do with Shakespeare and his Tempest??" Well, the name originally came after the spelling of letters "R" "E" "L" (“[a:*]-[i:]-[el]”), for REcovery Language. But then, while reading The Tempest, I found this fragment:

ARIEL My master through his art foresees the danger
            That you, his friend, are in; and sends me forth—
            For else his project dies—to keep them living.
(Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act II, Scene I)

I was amazed—it all seemed to fit together so nicely! In Shakespeare's Tempest spirit Ariel is a magic creature, the invisible assistant of Prospero, the Duke of Milano. All was going a-okay with Prospero and his daughter Miranda, or at least until his brother Antonio decided it was time for him to replace his brother as the new Duke. Antonio wastes no time and has Prospero and Miranda abandoned on a raft at sea, where they would have certainly died were it not for supplies and some books of magic, courtesy of good-hearted Gonzalo. Thanks to those books ("...through his art…") Prospero calls forth "his familiar spirit Ariel, his chief magical agent". (Amazing, isn't it??) And Ariel starts serving Prospero along several threads of action. In particular he conjures a Tempest that brings all characters in the same scene. There Prospero can keep an eye (Ariel's actually) on everybody, good and bad alike. Many "wonders" take place until all wrongs are righted and all evil is banished. All errors are recovered, we could say. Precisely what we expect to have when the ARIEL program stops processing! Magic, isn't it 😉

For more information about this "Comedy of Errors" (and recovery thereof!), you could also have a look at this book! Or ask me your questions here of course 😃

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A Comedy of Errors! by Vincenzo De Florio is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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