This paper addresses the problem of defining a formal tool to compare the expressive power of different concurrent constraint languages. We refine the notion of embedding by adding some "reasonable" conditions, suitable for concurrent frameworks. The new notion, called modular embedding, is used to define a preorder among these languages, representing different degrees of expressiveness. We show that this preorder is not trivial (i.e. it does not collapse into one equivalence class) by proving that Flat CP cannot be embedded into Flat GHC, and that Flat GHC cannot be embedded into a language without communication primitives in the guards, while the converses hold. 4 A; C; D; G; M;O;P;R; T : In calligraphic style. ss; ff ; dd: In slanted style. \Sigma; \Gamma; #; oe; ; /; ø; ff. S ; [; "; ;; 2 j=; 6j=; ; 9 +; k; ~ +; ~ k; ! \Gamma! W ; \Gamma! ; ; \Gamma! W ; \Gamma! ; h; i; [[; ]]; d; e ffi; ?; ; 5 All reasonable programming languages are equivalent, since they are Turing...

Abstract. In this paper, we study eight asynchronous communication primitives, arising from the combination of three features: arity (monadic vs polyadic data), communication medium (message passing vs shared dataspaces) and patternmatching. Each primitive has been already used in at least one language appeared in literature; however, to uniformly reason on such primitives, we plugged them in a common framework inspired by the asynchronous ¢-calculus. By means of possibility/impossibility of ‘reasonable ’ encodings, we compare every pair of primitives to obtain a hierarchy of languages based on their relative expressive power. 1

The endeavor to extend logic programming to a language suitable for concurrent systems has stimulated in the last decade an intensive research, resulting in a large variety of proposals. A common feature of the various approaches is the attempt to define mechanisms for concurrency within the logical paradigm, the driving ideal being the balance between expressiveness and declarative reading. In this survey we present the motivations, the principal lines along which the field has developed, the various paradigms which have been proposed, and the main approaches to the semantic foundations. 1 Introduction Among the various reasons which have contributed to the popularity of logic programming, one is the opinion that it is an inherently parallel language, therefore suitable for parallel and distributed architectures. The pure language can already be regarded as a model for parallel computation: in the so-called process interpretation (van Emden and de Lucena 1982; Shapiro 1983), the goal...

We investigate methods and tools for analyzing translations between programming languages with respect to observational semantics. The behavior of programs is observed in terms of may- and mustconvergence in arbitrary contexts, and adequacy of translations, i.e., the reflection of program equivalence, is taken to be the fundamental correctness condition. For compositional translations we propose a notion of convergence equivalence as a means for proving adequacy. This technique avoids explicit reasoning about contexts, and is able to deal with the subtle role of typing in implementations of language extensions.

The problem of replaying computations of nondeterministic concurrent programs arises in contexts such as debugging and recovery. We investigate the problem for an abstract model of concurrency, which generalizes dataflow networks, processors with shared variables, and logic programming models of concurrency. We say that nondeterminism is visible if the state is determined, up to some (appropriately defined) notion of equivalence, by the external behavior. We show that if nondeterminism is visible then replay is achievable using a one-step lookahead sequential simulation algorithm. If the program has an additional monotonicity property called stability then recovery is possible without simulating the original computation, by restarting the program from a certain easily constructed state. Also, for stable programs with visible nondeterminism, a process composed of identical parallel processes has the same external behavior as each of its components. Hence high crash-failure res...

We present a general and uniform method for defining structural operational semantics (SOS) of process operators by traditional Plotkin-style transition rules equipped with orderings. This new feature allows one to control the order of application of rules when deriving transitions of process terms. Our method is powerful enough to deal with rules with negative premises and copying. We show that rules with orderings, called ordered SOS rules, have the same expressive power as GSOS rules. We identify several classes of process languages with operators defined by rules with and without orderings in the setting with silent actions and divergence. We prove that branching bisimulation and eager bisimulation relations are preserved by all operators in process languages in the relevant classes.

Machine of Berry and Boudol, and the Join calculus of L'evy and his colleagues. Unfortunately, at that time we didn't continue the project because we could not figure out an appropriate "logical meaning" of these extended clauses (which was our original goal). Later on, after Linear Logic became popular, Andreoli and Pareshi have proposed an analogous language (Linear Objects) and have shown that it can be seen as a fragment of Linear Logic.