In this paper we introduce the notion of Modal Software Engineering: automatically turning sequential, deterministic programs into semantically equivalent programs efficiently operating on inputs coming from multiple intersecting worlds. We are drawing an analogy between modal logics, and software application domains where multiple sets of inputs (multiple worlds) need to be processed efficiently. Typically those sets highly overlap, so processing them independently would result in a lot of redundancy, resulting in lower performance, and in many cases intractability. Three application domains are presented: reasoning about feature-based variability of Software Product Lines (SPLs), probabilistic programming, and approximate programming.

中文翻译：

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迈向模态软件工程

在本文中，我们介绍了模态软件工程的概念：自动将顺序确定性程序转换为语义等效的程序，这些程序可以有效地处理来自多个相交世界的输入。我们正在模态逻辑和软件应用程序域之间进行类比，在其中需要有效处理多组输入（多个世界）。通常，这些集合高度重叠，因此独立处理它们会导致大量冗余，从而导致性能降低，并且在许多情况下难以处理。提出了三个应用领域：关于软件产品线（SPL）基于特征的可变性的推理，概率编程和近似编程。