Abstract
We introduce a calculus for concurrent and communicating processes, which is a direct and simple extension of the λ-calculus. The communication mechanism we use is that of Milner's calculus CCS: to communicate consists in synchronously sending and receiving a value through a shared port. Then the calculus is parameterized on a given set of port names, which are used in the two primitives for sending and receiving a value — as in the λ-calculus, a value can be any term. We use two parallel constructs: the first is interleaving, which does not allow communication between agents. The second, called cooperation, is a synchronizing construct which forces two agents to communicate on every port name. We show that the λ-calculus is a simple sub-calculus of ours: λ-abstraction is a particular case of reception (on a port named λ), and application is a particular case of cooperation.
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© 1989 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Boudol, G. (1989). Towards a lambda-calculus for concurrent and communicating systems. In: Díaz, J., Orejas, F. (eds) TAPSOFT '89. CAAP 1989. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 351. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-50939-9_130
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-50939-9_130
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