Synchronous structures

Synchronous languages have been designed to ease the development of reactive systems, by providing a methodological framework for assisting system designers from the early stages of requirement specifications to the final stages of code generation or circuit production. Synchronous languages enable a very high-level specification and an extremely modular design of complex reactive systems by structural decomposition of them into elementary processes. We define an order-theoretical model that gives a unified mathematical formalisation of all the above aspects of the synchronous methodology and characterises the essentials of the synchronous paradigm.