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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00611 |
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| _version_ | 1866908681894887424 |
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| author | Binard, Franck Kljajevic, Vanja |
| author_facet | Binard, Franck Kljajevic, Vanja |
| contents | Prism is a small, compositional metalanguage for specifying the behaviour of tool-using software agents. Rather than introducing ad hoc control constructs, Prism is built around a fixed core context, Core1, which provides a minimal background grammar of categories numbers, strings, user prompts, tools together with abstract combinators for booleans, predicates, pairs, and lists. Agent policies are written as ordinary expressions using a single abstraction operator so that conditionals appear as selections between alternatives instead of imperative if-else blocks. Domains extend the core by defining their own context-mini-grammars that introduce new categories, predicates, and external tools while reusing the same compositional machinery. We illustrate this with worked examples from thermostat control, home security, e-commerce recommendation, and medical monitoring, showing how natural language decision rules can be mapped to inspectable, executable policies. From a linguistic perspective, Prism enforces a clear separation between a reusable grammar-like core and domain specific lexicons and treats tools as bridges between internal policy representations and the external world. From an engineering perspective, it offers a compact interface language for agent control, making the space of possible actions explicit and amenable to analysis, verification, and safety constraints. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_00611 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Prism: A Minimal Compositional Metalanguage for Specifying Agent Behavior Binard, Franck Kljajevic, Vanja Computation and Language Prism is a small, compositional metalanguage for specifying the behaviour of tool-using software agents. Rather than introducing ad hoc control constructs, Prism is built around a fixed core context, Core1, which provides a minimal background grammar of categories numbers, strings, user prompts, tools together with abstract combinators for booleans, predicates, pairs, and lists. Agent policies are written as ordinary expressions using a single abstraction operator so that conditionals appear as selections between alternatives instead of imperative if-else blocks. Domains extend the core by defining their own context-mini-grammars that introduce new categories, predicates, and external tools while reusing the same compositional machinery. We illustrate this with worked examples from thermostat control, home security, e-commerce recommendation, and medical monitoring, showing how natural language decision rules can be mapped to inspectable, executable policies. From a linguistic perspective, Prism enforces a clear separation between a reusable grammar-like core and domain specific lexicons and treats tools as bridges between internal policy representations and the external world. From an engineering perspective, it offers a compact interface language for agent control, making the space of possible actions explicit and amenable to analysis, verification, and safety constraints. |
| title | Prism: A Minimal Compositional Metalanguage for Specifying Agent Behavior |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00611 |