A specification idiom for reactive systems

Interrupt- and event-driven applications constitute an important system class, with connections to desktop computing, embedded systems, and sensor networks. We refer to this set of applications collectively as reactive systems. In this paper, we present a specification idiom for documenting reactive system behavior. Specifically, we discuss an approach to documenting split-phase operations - operations that involve a request, followed by a deferred out-of-context callback. We derive the idiom by example using interfaces from the TinyOS library, a popular component library for sensor network applications. We conclude with a broader discussion of specification idioms for reactive systems.