Abstract

In this paper we establish new expressiveness results for indeterminate dataflow primitives. We consider split primitives with three differing fairness assumptions and show that they are strictly inequivalent in expressive power. We also show that the ability to announce internal choices enhances the expressive power of two of the primitives. These results are proved using a very crude notion of observation and thus apply in any reasonable theory of process equivalence. 1 Introduction Fairness is regarded as an important property of real systems and there is considerable interest in semantic theories and proof systems for reasoning about fairness [12]. In the present paper we examine the relative expressive power of a variety of fairness primitives and prove new inexpressibility results in the context of asynchronous systems. We prove that three different "split" primitives have different expressive power. We also consider the effect of adding signaling to each primitive. By "signalin...

Citations