Functional units for natural numbers

Abstract

Interaction with services provided by an execution environment forms part of the behaviours exhibited by instruction sequences under execution. Mechanisms related to the kind of interaction in question have been proposed in the setting of thread algebra. Like thread, service is an abstract behavioural concept. The concept of a functional unit is similar to the concept of a service, but more concrete. A state space is inherent in the concept of a functional unit, whereas it is not inherent in the concept of a service. In this paper, we establish the existence of a universal computable functional unit for natural numbers and related results.Comment: 17 pages; notational mistakes in tables 5 and 6 corrected; erroneous definition at bottom of page 9 correcte