Nominal Regular Expressions for Languages over Infinite Alphabets. Extended Abstract

Abstract: We propose regular expressions to abstractly model and study properties of resource-aware computations. Inspired by nominal techniques -- as those popular in process calculi -- we extend classical regular expressions with names (to model computational resources) and suitable operators (for allocation, deallocation, scoping of, and freshness conditions on resources). We discuss classes of such nominal regular expressions, show how such expressions have natural interpretations in terms of languages over infinite alphabets, and give Kleene theorems to characterise their formal languages in terms of nominal automata.