The π-calculus offers an attractive basis for concurrent programming. It is small, elegant, and well studied, and supports (via simple encodings) a wide range of high-level constructs including data structures, higher-order functional programming, concurrent control structures, and objects. Moreover, familiar type systems for the -calculus have direct counterparts in the π-calculus, yielding strong, static typing for a high-level language using the π-calculus as its core. This paper describes Pict, a strongly-typed concurrent programming language constructed in terms of an explicitly-typed-calculus core language.

We develop principles and rules for achieving secrecy properties in security protocols. Our approach is based on traditional classification techniques, and extends those techniques to handle concurrent processes that use shared-key cryptography. The rules have the form of typing rules for a basic concurrent language with cryptographic primitives, the spi calculus. They guarantee that, if a protocol typechecks, then it does not leak its secret inputs.

INTRODUCTION Mobile computation, where independent agents roam widely distributed networks in search of resources and information, is fast becoming a reality. A number of programming languages, APIs and protocols have recently emerged which seek to provide high-level support for mobile agents. These include Java [30], Odyssey [15], Aglets [19], Voyager [24] and the latest revisions of the Internet protocol [25, 2]. In addition to these commercial efforts, many prototype languages have been developed and implemented within the programming language research community --- examples include Linda [8, 9], Facile [16], Obliq [7], Infospheres [11], the join calculus [13], and Nomadic Pict [33]. In this paper we address the issue of resource access control for such languages. Central to the paradigm of mobile computation are the notions of agent, resource and location. Agents are effective entities that perform computation and interact with other First publis

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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).

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.

The asynchronous pi-calculus is considered the basis of experimental programming languages (or proposal of programming languages) like Pict, Join, and Blue calculus. However, at a closer inspection, these languages are based on an even simpler calculus, called Local (L), where: (a) only the output capability of names may be transmitted; (b) there is no matching or similar constructs for testing equality between names. We study the basic operational and algebraic theory of Lpi. We focus on bisimulation-based behavioural equivalences, precisely on barbed congruence. We prove two coinductive characterisations of barbed congruence in Lpi, and some basic algebraic laws. We then show applications of this theory, including: the derivability of delayed input; the correctness of an optimisation of the encoding of call-by-name lambda-calculus; the validity of some laws for Join.

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.

Linear types (types of values that can be used just once) have been drawing a great deal of attention because they are useful for memory management, in-place update of data structures, etc.: an obvious advantage is that a value of a linear type can be immediately deallocated after being used. However, the linear types have not been applied so widely in practice, probably because linear values (values of linear types) in the traditional sense do not so often appear in actual programs. In order to increase the applicability of linear types, we relax the condition of linearity by extending the types with information on an evaluation order and simple dataflow information. The extended type system, called a quasi-linear type system, is formalized and its correctness is proved. We have implemented a prototype type inference system for the core-ML that can automatically find out which value is linear in the relaxed sense. Promising results were obtained from preliminary experiments with the p...