Life of occam-Pi

This paper considers some questions prompted by a brief review of the history of computing. Why is programming so hard? Why is concurrency considered an “advanced” subject? What’s the matter with Objects? Where did all the Maths go? In searching for answers, the paper looks at some concerns over fundamental ideas within object orientation (as represented by modern programming languages), before focussing on the concurrency model of communicating processes and its particular expression in the occam family of languages. In that focus, it looks at the history of occam, its underlying philosophy (Ockham’s Razor), its semantic foundation on Hoare’s CSP, its principles of process oriented design and its development over almost three decades into occam-? (which blends in the concurrency dynamics of Milner’s ?-calculus). Also presented will be an urgent need for rationalisation – occam-? is an experiment that has demonstrated significant results, but now needs time to be spent on careful review and implementing the conclusions of that review. Finally, the future is considered. In particular, is there a future

Session Types in Concurrent Calculi: Higher-Order Processes and Objects

This dissertation investigates different formalisms, in the form of programming language calculi, that are aimed at providing a theoretical foundation for structured concurrent programming based on session types. The structure of a session type is essentially a process-algebraic style description of the behaviour of a single program identifier serving as a communication medium (and usually referred to as a channel): the types incorporate typed inputs, outputs, and choices which can be composed to form larger protocol descriptions. The effectiveness of session typing can be attributed to the linear treatment of channels and session types, and to the use of tractable methods such as syntactic duality to decide if the types of two connected channels are compatible. Linearity is ensured when accumulating the uses of a channel into a composite type that describes also the order of those actions. Duality provides a tractable and intuitive method for deciding when two connected channels can interact and exchange values in a statically determined type-safe way. We present our contributions to the theory of sessions, distilled into two families of programming calculi, the first based on higher-order processes and the second based on objects. Our work unifies, improves and extends, in manifold ways, the session primitives and typing systems for the Lambda-calculus, the Pi-calculus, the Object-calculus, and their combinations in multi-paradigm languages. Of particular interest are: the treatment of infinite interactions expressed with recursive sessions; the capacity to encapsulate channels in higher-order structures which can be exchanged and kept suspended, i.e., the use of code as data; the integration of protocol structure directly into the description of objects, providing a powerful and uniformly extensible set of implementation abstractions; finally, the introduction of asynchronous subtyping, which enables controlled reordering of actions on either side of a session. Our work on higher-order processes and on object calculi for session-based concurrent programming provides a theoretical foundation for programming language design integrating functional, process, and object-oriented features

Foundations of Session Types and Behavioural Contracts

International audienceBehavioural type systems, usually associated to concurrent or distributed computations, encompass concepts such as interfaces, communication protocols, and contracts, in addition to the traditional input/output operations. The behavioural type of a software component specifies its expected patterns of interaction using expressive type languages, so that types can be used to determine automatically whether the component interacts correctly with other components. Two related important notions of behavioural types are those of session types and behavioural contracts. This paper surveys the main accomplishments of the last twenty years within these two approaches

Behavioral types in programming languages

A recent trend in programming language research is to use behav- ioral type theory to ensure various correctness properties of large- scale, communication-intensive systems. Behavioral types encompass concepts such as interfaces, communication protocols, contracts, and choreography. The successful application of behavioral types requires a solid understanding of several practical aspects, from their represen- tation in a concrete programming language, to their integration with other programming constructs such as methods and functions, to de- sign and monitoring methodologies that take behaviors into account. This survey provides an overview of the state of the art of these aspects, which we summarize as the pragmatics of behavioral types

Linear Types, Protocols, and Processes in Classical F°

Session types and typestate both promise a type system that can reason about protocol adherence. The complexity budgets of most programming languages, however, do not allow for new forms of types aimed at specific problem domains--even domains as broad as these. Classical F◦ --read F-pop --is a typed λ-calculus based on classical (i.e., full) linear logic, wherein session types arise naturally from the interaction between the usual sums, products, and implications of linear logic and a simple process model, with the dualizing negation of classical logic naturally accounting for how a protocol is seen by each of a channel\u27s endpoints. Classical F◦ expressions evaluate to processes, reminiscent of those in the π-calculus, that communicate over channels, but source expressions, rather than including processes and channels, employ only two novel control operators that account for process creation and communication. F◦ is introduced by way of its intuitionistic fragment, which even on its own can account for typestate: the combination of linearity and polymorphism leads to natural encodings of many programmer-specified protocols. In fact, any protocol expressible as a regular language can be encoded in an intuitionistic F◦ type. F◦ distinguishes between linear and unrestricted types by using kinds together with a notion of subkinding, avoiding the pitfalls of approaches based on type qualifiers or modalities; kinds are related by a subkinding order that allows unrestricted types to be treated as though they were linear. Soundness for intuitionistic and classical F◦ is proved both in the standard operational sense of preservation and progress and for an augmented semantics that shows more directly that the expected properties of linearity are preserved. This establishes the absence of deadlocks in closed, well-typed F◦ programs; it also guarantees that such programs will not leak processes as long as their result types are unrestricted

Polymorphic Context-free Session Types

Context-free session types provide a typing discipline for recursive structured communication protocols on bidirectional channels. They overcome the restriction of regular session type systems to tail recursive protocols. This extension enables us to implement serialisation and deserialisation of tree structures in a fully type-safe manner. We present the theory underlying the language FreeST 2, which features context-free session types in an extension of System F with linear types and a kind system to distinguish message types and channel types. The system presents some metatheoretical challenges, which we address, contractivity in the presence of polymorphism, a non-trivial equational theory on types, and decidability of type equivalence. We also establish standard results on type preservation, progress, and a characterisation of erroneous processes

From X to Pi; Representing the Classical Sequent Calculus in the Pi-calculus

We study the Pi-calculus, enriched with pairing and non-blocking input, and define a notion of type assignment that uses the type constructor "arrow". We encode the circuits of the calculus X into this variant of Pi, and show that all reduction (cut-elimination) and assignable types are preserved. Since X enjoys the Curry-Howard isomorphism for Gentzen's calculus LK, this implies that all proofs in LK have a representation in Pi.Comment: International Workshop on Classical Logic and Computation (CL&C'08), Reykjavik, Iceland, July 200

Relating Session Types and Behavioural Contracts: The Asynchronous Case

We discuss the relationship between session types and behavioural contracts under the assumption that processes communicate asynchronously. We show the existence of a fully abstract interpretation of session types into a fragment of contracts, that maps session subtyping into binary compliance-preserving contract refinement. In this way, the recent undecidability result for asynchronous session subtyping can be used to obtain an original undecidability result for asynchronous contract refinement