We present a small language L and its typing system based on the idea of interaction, one of the important notions in parallel and distributed computing. L is based on, apart from such constructs as parallel composition and process creation, three pairs of communication primitives which use the notion of a session, a semantically atomic chain of communication actions which can interleave with other such chains freely, for high-level abstraction of interaction-based computing. Three primitives enable programmers to elegantly describe complex interactions among processes with a rigorous type discipline similar to ML [4]. The language is given formal operational semantics and a type inference system, regarding which we prove that if a program is well-typed in the typing system, it never causes run-time error due to type inconsistent communication patterns, offering a new foundation for type discipline in parallel programming languages. 1 Introduction The idea of interaction, that is, rec...

We investigate whether the π-calculus is able to serve as a good foundation for the design and implementation of a strongly-typed concurrent programming language. The first half of the dissertation examines whether the π-calculus supports a simple type system which is flexible enough to provide a suitable foundation for the type system of a concurrent programming language. The second half of the dissertation considers how to implement the π-calculus efficiently, starting with an abstract machine for π-calculus and finally presenting a compilation of π-calculus to C. We start the dissertation by presenting a simple, structural type system for π-calculus, and then, after proving the soundness of our type system, show how to infer principal types for π-terms. This simple type system can be extended to include useful type-theoretic constructions such as recursive types and higherorder polymorphism. Higher-order polymorphism is important, since it gives us the ability to implement abstract datatypes in a type-safe manner, thereby providing a greater degree of modularity for π-calculus programs. The functional computational paradigm plays an important part in many programming languages. It is well-known that the π-calculus can encode functional computation. We go further and show that the type structure of λ-terms is preserved by such encodings, in the sense that we can relate the type of a λ-term to the type of its encoding in the π-calculus. This means that a π-calculus programming language can genuinely support typed functional programming as a special case. An efficient implementation of π-calculus is necessary if we wish to consider π-calculus as an operational foundation for concurrent programming. We first give a simple abstract machine for π-calculus and prove it correct. We then show how this abstract machine inspires a simple, but efficient, compilation of π-calculus to C (which now forms the basis of the Pict programming language implementation).

The emerging paradigm of electronic services promises to bring to distributed computation and services the flexibility that the web has brought to the sharing of documents. An understanding of fundamental properties of e-service composition is required in order to take full advantage of the paradigm. This paper examines proposals and standards for e-services from the perspectives of XML, data management, workflow, and process models. Key areas for study are identified, including behavioral service signatures, verification and synthesis techniques for composite services, analysis of service data manipulation commands, and XML analysis applied to service specifications. We give a sample of the relevant results and techniques in each of these areas.

By adding reflexion to the chemical machine of Berry and Boudol, we obtain a formal model of concurrency that is consistent with mobility and distribution. Our model provides the foundations of a programming language with functional and object-oriented features. It can also be seen as a process calculus, the join-calculus, which we prove equivalent to the pi-calculus of Milner, Parrow and Walker.

We propose a general, powerful framework of type systems for the #-calculus, and show that we can obtain as its instances a variety of type systems guaranteeing non-trivial properties like deadlock-freedom and race-freedom. A key idea is to express types and type environments as abstract processes: We can check various properties of a process by checking the corresponding properties of its type environment. The framework clarifies the essence of recent complex type systems, and it also enables sharing of a large amount of work such as a proof of type preservation, making it easy to develop new type systems.

We obtain a new formalism for concurrent object-oriented languages by extending Abadi and Cardelli's imperative object calculus with operators for concurrency from the-calculus and with operators for synchronisation based on mutexes. Our syntax of terms is extremely expressive; in a precise sense it unifies notions of expression, process, store, thread, and configuration. We present a chemical-style reduction semantics, and prove it equivalent to a structural operational semantics. We identify a deterministic fragment that is closed under reduction and show that it includes the imperative object calculus. A collection of type systems for object-oriented constructs is at the heart of Abadi and Cardelli's work. We recast one of Abadi and Cardelli's first-order type systems with object types and subtyping in the setting of our calculus and prove subject reduction. Since our syntax of terms includes both stores and running expressions, we avoid the need to separate store typing from typing of expressions. We translate asynchronous communication channels and the choice-free asynchronous-calculus into our calculus to illustrate its expressiveness; the types of read-only and write-only channels are supertypes of read-write channels.

The π-calculus is a process algebra which originates from CCS and permits a natural modelling of mobility (i.e., dynamic reconfigurations of the process linkage) using communication of names. Previous research has shown that the π-calculus has much greater expressiveness than CCS, but also a much more complex mathematical theory. The primary goal of this work is to understand the reasons of this gap. Another goal is to compare the expressiveness of name-passing calculi, i.e., calculi like π-calculus where mobility is achieved via exchange of names, and that of agent-passing calculi, i.e., calculi where mobility is achieved via exchange of agents. We separate the mobility mechanisms of the π-calculus into two, respectively called internal mobility and external mobility. The study of the subcalculus which only uses internal mobility, called I, suggests that internal mobility is responsible for much of the expressiveness of the π-calculus, whereas external mobility is responsible for many of...

We formulate a typed formalism for concurrency where types denote freely composable structure of dyadic interaction in the symmetric scheme. The resulting calculus is a typed reconstruction of name passing process calculi. Systems with both the explicit and implicit typing disciplines, where types form a simple hierarchy of types, are presented, which are proved to be in accordance with each other. A typed variant of bisimilarity is formulated and it is shown that typed fi-equality has a clean embedding in the bisimilarity. Name reference structure induced by the simple hierarchy of types is studied, which fully characterises the typable terms in the set of untyped terms. It turns out that the name reference structure results in the deadlock-free property for a subset of terms with a certain regular structure, showing behavioural significance of the simple type discipline. 1 Introduction This is a preliminary study of types for concurrency. Types here denote freely composable structur...

. We present a partially-typed semantics for Dp, a distributed p-calculus. The semantics is designed for mobile agents in open distributed systems in which some sites may harbor malicious intentions. Nonetheless, the semantics guarantees traditional type-safety properties at good locations by using a mixture of static and dynamic type-checking. We show how the semantics can be extended to allow trust between sites, improving performance and expressiveness without compromising type-safety. 1 Introduction In [12] we presented a type system for controlling the use of resources in a distributed system, or network. The type system guarantees two properties: resource access is always safe, e.g. integer resources are always accessed with integers and string resources are always accessed with strings, and resource access is always authorized, i.e. resources may only be accessed by agents that have been granted permission to do so. While these properties are desirable, they are properti...

This paper considers how locality restrictions on the use of capabilities can be enforced by a static type system. A distributed π-calculus with a simple reduction semantics is introduced, integrating location and migration primitives from the Distributed Join Calculus with asynchronous π communication. It is given a type system in which the input and output capabilities of channels may be either global, local or absent. This allows compile-time optimization where possible but retains the expressiveness of channel communication. Subtyping allows all communications to be invoked uniformly. We show that the most local possible capabilities for internal channels can be inferred automatically.