Research Group on Natural Computing

A new programming language for membrane computing, P-Lingua, is developed in this paper. This language is not designed for a specific simulator software. On the contrary, its purpose is to offer a general syntactic framework that could define a unified 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 scientific 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, while different plugins can be designed to produce specific adequate outputs for existing simulators.
Furthermore, we present in this paper an integrated development environment that plays the role of an 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.