Overview Much of our everyday behavior is governed by conventions. The shape of the line we form at the café, the language we use to order our coffee, and the money we use to pay for it are all partly arbitrary but self-sustaining solutions to recurring coordination problems. This definition, first formalized by David Lewis (1969), has provided a potent means of characterizing conventions. For ...

This paper addresses the problem of supporting programming conventions in a general-purpose language. We are working on a technique which allows programming conventions to be formalized and annotated to a program, and where interactive tools support the sug-

1. INTRODUCTION. A cycloid is the path traced by a point on the boundary of a circular disk that rolls without slipping along a straight line. It forms a sequence of arches resting on the line, as shown in Figure 1. It is known that the area of the shaded region below one arch is three times the area of the rolling disk. Our analysis shows that the factor 3 reflects a much deeper property of cy...