Paper Details

Focussing on Traces to Link VCR and CSP

Authors: Smith, Marc L.

Abstract:

View-Centric Reasoning (VCR) replaces CSP's perfect observer with multiple, possibly imperfect observers. To employ view-centric reasoning within existing CSP models requires a bookkeeping change. Specifically, VCR introduces parallel events as a new primitive for constructing traces, and distinguishes two types of event traces: histories and views. Previously, we gave the operational semantics of VCR, and demonstrated the utility of parallel event traces to reason for the first time unambiguously about the meaning of the Linda predicate operations rdp() and inp(). The choice of using an operational semantics to describe VCR makes direct comparison with CSP difficult; therefore, work is ongoing to recast VCR denotationally, then link it with the other CSP models within Hoare and He's Unifying Theories of Programming. Initial efforts in this direction led to a comparison of VCR with Lawrence's HCSP. In this paper, we present some recent insights and abstractions - inspired by modern quantum physics - that have emerged whilst contemplating parallel event traces in light of the unifying theories. These insights lead to a more natural expression of VCR traces, in the sense that they more closely resemble CSP traces, thus forming a basis for linking VCR and CSP.

Proceedings:

Communicating Process Architectures 2004, Ian R. East, David Duce, Mark Green, Jeremy M. R. Martin, Peter H. Welch, 2004, pp 353 - 360 published by IOS Press, Amsterdam

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