Alloy - Programming language

Alloy is a programming language created in 1997.

#684on PLDB

27Years Old

759Repos

In computer science and software engineering, Alloy is a declarative specification language for expressing complex structural constraints and behavior in a software system. Alloy provides a simple structural modeling tool based on first-order logic. Alloy is targeted at the creation of micro-models that can then be automatically checked for correctness. Read more on Wikipedia...

Tags: programming language
There are at least 759 Alloy repos on GitHub
Early development of Alloy happened in MIT
The Google BigQuery Public Dataset GitHub snapshot shows 84 users using Alloy in 90 repos on GitHub
Pygments supports syntax highlighting for Alloy
GitHub supports syntax highlighting for Alloy
alloytools.org was registered in 2017
See also: (1 related languages) Z notation

Example from the web:

// A file system object in the file system
sig FSObject { parent: lone Dir }

// A directory in the file system
sig Dir extends FSObject { contents: set FSObject }

// A file in the file system
sig File extends FSObject { }

// A directory is the parent of its contents
fact { all d: Dir, o: d.contents | o.parent = d }

// All file system objects are either files or directories
fact { File + Dir = FSObject }

// There exists a root
one sig Root extends Dir { } { no parent }

// File system is connected
fact { FSObject in Root.*contents }

// The contents path is acyclic
assert acyclic { no d: Dir | d in d.^contents }

// Now check it for a scope of 5
check acyclic for 5

// File system has one root
assert oneRoot { one d: Dir | no d.parent }

// Now check it for a scope of 5
check oneRoot for 5

// Every fs object is in at most one directory
assert oneLocation { all o: FSObject | lone d: Dir | o in d.contents }

// Now check it for a scope of 5
check oneLocation for 5

Example from Linguist:

module examples/systems/file_system

/*
 * Model of a generic file system.
 */

abstract sig Object {}

sig Name {}

sig File extends Object {} { some d: Dir | this in d.entries.contents }

sig Dir extends Object {
  entries: set DirEntry,
  parent: lone Dir
} {
  parent = this.~@contents.~@entries
  all e1, e2 : entries | e1.name = e2.name => e1 = e2
  this !in this.^@parent
  this != Root => Root in this.^@parent
}

one sig Root extends Dir {} { no parent }

lone sig Cur extends Dir {}

sig DirEntry {
  name: Name,
  contents: Object
} {
  one this.~entries
}


/**
 * all directories besides root have one parent
 */
pred OneParent_buggyVersion {
    all d: Dir - Root | one d.parent
}

/**
 * all directories besides root have one parent
 */
pred OneParent_correctVersion {
    all d: Dir - Root | (one d.parent && one contents.d)
}

/**
 * Only files may be linked (that is, have more than one entry)
 * That is, all directories are the contents of at most one directory entry
 */
pred NoDirAliases {
    all o: Dir | lone o.~contents
}

check { OneParent_buggyVersion => NoDirAliases } for 5 expect 1

check { OneParent_correctVersion => NoDirAliases } for 5 expect 0

Language features

Feature	Supported	Example	Token
Integers	✓	// [0-9]+
MultiLine Comments	✓	/* A comment */	/* */
Comments	✓	// A comment
Line Comments	✓	// A comment	//
Semantic Indentation	X