A Syntactic Theory of Message Passing

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Abstract
Recent developments by Hewitt and others have stimulated interest in message-passing constructs as an alternative to the more conventional applicative semantics on which most current languages are based. The present work illuminates the distinction between applicative and message-passing semantics by means of the μ -calculus, a syntactic model of message-passing systems similar in mechanism to the λ-calculus. Algorithms for the translation of expressions from the λ- to the μ -calculus are presented, and differences between the two approaches are discussed. Message-passing semantics seem particularly applicable to the study of multiprocessing. The μ -calculus, through the mechanism of conduits, provides a simple model for a limited but interesting class of parallel computations. Multiprocessing capabilities of the μ -calculus are illustrated, and multiple-processor implementations are discussed briefly.

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