Abstract

The -calculus offers an attractive basis for concurrent programming languages. It is small, elegant, and well understood, and it supports, via simple encodings,a wide range of high-level constructs such as structured data, higher-order programming, concurrent control structures, and objects. Moreover, familiar type systems for the -calculus have direct counterparts in the -calculus, yielding strong, static typing for high-level languages defined in this way. 1 Introduction Though it originated some years before computer science itself, the -calculus has come to be regarded as a canonical calculus capturing the notion of sequential computation in an elegant, mathematically tractable presentation. Many of the fundamental issues of sequential programming languages can profitably be studied by considering them in the more abstract setting of the -calculus. Conversely, the -calculus has strongly influenced the design of many programming languages, notably McCarthy's LISP [McC78]. Mil...

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