Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Concurrent Processes and Their Syntax (1979) [pdf] (acm.org)
56 points by aebtebeten on Feb 6, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments


For more about the flow algebra, see the companion paper:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/322154.322167 (PDF)


Always good to see classic concurrency theory/process algebras on HN. But I do wonder why this paper specifically and not other, much more mature works (even by Milner himself!)


Pure accident: I ran across this specific work in the references of a near-contemporary HOPE paper and found it interesting not only for its conclusions but also for the insight into their general approach; if you have superseding work to recommend, URLs —or at least cites— would always be welcome!


Key phrases/words to look up are "Calculus of Communicating Systems", "π-calculus", and "bigraphs", "the space and motion of communicating agents"

CCS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_communicating_syst...

π-calculus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A0-calculus

Bigraphs, "space and motion": https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rm135/Bigraphs-draft.pdf

Bigraphs, "space and motion": https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rm135/uam-theme.html


Besides Jtsummers' great list of citations, I would also suggest [2] as an overview of traditional process algebras and how they formalize and reason about concurrent processes. It focuses a bit more on a specific way of doing these things (namely, by giving processes a structural operational semantics based on labelled transition systems), but other approaches are also introduced and referenced. If you are looking for more thorough, but still undergrad-level treatments, then [1, 3] are safe bets.

[1] Luca Aceto, Anna Ingólfsdóttir, Kim Guldstrand Larsen, and Jiri Srba. 2007. Reactive Systems. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Retrieved from http://ebooks.cambridge.org/ref/id/CBO9780511814105

[1] R De Nicola, A Gentle Introduction to Process Algebras, https://www.pst.ifi.lmu.de/Lehre/fruhere-semester/sose-2013/...

[3] Jan Friso Groote and Mohammad Reza Mousavi. 2014. Modeling and Analysis of Communicating Systems. MIT Press. Retrieved from https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/modeling-and-analysis-communi...


You might also like

M. Nielsen, V. Sassone, G. Winskel "Relationships Between Models of Concurrency".

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Relationships-Between-...




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: