Review of The π-calculus A Theory of Mobile Processes

Short Description
D. Sangiorgi, D. Walker, The ?-calculus: A Theory of Mobile Processes, Cambridge University Press, 2001, 580pp, ISBN 0521781779. …

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Content
Review of
The -calculus: A Theory of Mobile Processes
Riccardo Pucella
Department of Computer Science
Cornell University
July 8, 2001
Introduction
With the rise of computer networks in the past decades, the spread of distributed applications with components across
multiple machines, and with new notions such as mobile code, there has been a need for formal methods to model
and reason about concurrency and mobility. The study of sequential computations has been based on notions such
as Turing machines, recursive functions, the -calculus, all equivalent formalisms capturing the essence of sequential
computations. Unfortunately, for concurrent programs, theories for sequential computation are not enough. Many
programs are not simply programs that compute a result and return it to the user, but rather interact with other programs,
and even move from machine to machine.
Process calculi are an attempt at getting a formal foundation based on such ideas. They emerged from the work of
Hoare [4] and Milner [6] on models of concurrency. These calculi are meant to model systems made up of processes
communicating by exchanging values across channels. They allow for the dynamic creation and removal of processes,
allowing the modelling of dynamic…