Operational semantics for signal handling

Signals are a lightweight form of interprocess communication in Unix. When a process receives a signal, the control flow is interrupted and a previously installed signal handler is run. Signal handling is reminiscent both of exception handling and concurrent interleaving of processes. In this paper, we investigate different approaches to formalizing signal handling in operational semantics, and compare them in a series of examples. We find the big-step style of operational semantics to be well suited to modelling signal handling. We integrate exception handling with our big-step semantics of signal handling, by adopting the exception convention as defined in the Definition of Standard ML. The semantics needs to capture the complex interactions between signal handling and exception handling.Comment: In Proceedings EXPRESS/SOS 2012, arXiv:1208.244

Proof theory for exception handling

in a tasking environmen

Advanced mechanisms for service combination and transactions

Languages and models for service-oriented applications usually include primitives and constructs for exception and compensation handling. Exception handling is used to react to unexpected events while compensation handling is used to undo previously completed activities. In this chapter we investigate the impact of exception and compensation handling in message-based process calculi and the related theories developed within Sensoria