A P-Lingua Programming Environment for Membrane Computing

Abstract

A new programming language for membrane computing, PLingua, is developed in this paper. This language is not designed for a speci c simulator software. On the contrary, its purpose is to o er a general syntactic framework that could de ne a uni ed standard for membrane computing, covering a broad variety of models. At the present stage, P-Lingua can only handle P systems with active membranes, although the authors intend to extend it to other models in the near future. P-Lingua allows to write programs in a friendly way, as its syntax is very close to standard scienti c notation, and parameterized expressions can be used as shorthand for sets of rules. There is a built-in compiler that parses these human-style programs and generates XML documents that can be given as input to simulation tools, di erent plugins can be designed to produce speci c adequate outputs for existing simulators. Furthermore, we present in this paper an integrated development environment that plays the role of interface where P-lingua programs can be written and compiled. We also present a simulator for the class of recognizer P systems with active membranes, and we illustrate it by following the writing, compiling and simulating processes with a family of P systems solving the SAT problem.