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Symposium on Real-Time and Hybrid Systems pp 26–43Cite as

Concurrency: Handling Interference Formally

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11180))

Abstract

Interference between threads makes it difficult to design concurrent programs. Faced with such a difficulty, it is reasonable to seek clarification and leverage from formality. Whereas powerful abstractions have been found for sequential programming languages, the inherent operational nature of interference infects attempts to describe it formally. Model-oriented (i.e. operational and denotational) and property-oriented (mainly axiomatic) descriptions of the semantics of programming languages that support shared-variable concurrency look totally different. This paper identifies the source of the challenge as accommodating interference and highlights some important connections between the approaches.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A wider review of the challenges that arise in writing formal semantic descriptions is given in [JA17]; more historical context is given in [JA16] (which will appear in the proceedings of HaPoP-16 as [AJ18]).

  2. 2.

    Any partition of \(\{1..N\}\) will serve—choosing to split odd/even indexes is notationally convenient and abbreviates the presentation.

  3. 3.

    The use of VDM notation will hopefully present no difficulty: it has been widely used for decades and is the subject of an ISO standard; one useful reference is [Jon90].

  4. 4.

    At the time Plotkin’s useful commentary was being written, the current author was writing [Jon03b] and drafts were exchanged between Plotkin and Jones that enriched the cross references.

  5. 5.

    The rule that is erroneously referred to as Reynold’s rule states that there should be only one shared variable in any assignment—this does not provide a general semantics.

  6. 6.

    The proceedings [Ste66] took two years to appear but are invaluable partly because they include transcripts of the recorded discussions.

  7. 7.

    They also always mentioned Cal Elgot and Peter Landin.

  8. 8.

    The adverse effects on proofs of putting unnecessary things in the state are examined in [JA16, §3].

  9. 9.

    Hoare’s path from a comment made at the 1964 Formal Language Description Languages Working Conference in Baden-bei-Wien to his Axiomatic Basis paper [Hoa69] is outlined in [JA16]. The relation to (but lack of influence of) earlier work by Turing and von Neumann is discussed in [Jon03a].

  10. 10.

    The decision to employ predicates of a single state even for post conditions looks convenient especially in this rule but the choice results in messy tricks to circumvent the fact that a specification should obviously relate the initial and final states—VDM [Jon80], Z [Hay86] and B [Abr96] all use relations.

  11. 11.

    Particularly interesting Chinese references include [Fen09, LFF12, Lia14].

  12. 12.

    The asymmetric version needed in examples such as concurrent garbage collection [JVY17] or Asynchronous Communication Mechanisms [JH16] is actually more interesting.

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  1. School of Computing, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Cliff B. Jones

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  1. Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK

    Cliff Jones

  2. National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China

    Ji Wang

  3. Institute of Software, CAS, Beijing, China

    Naijun Zhan

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Jones, C.B. (2018). Concurrency: Handling Interference Formally. In: Jones, C., Wang, J., Zhan, N. (eds) Symposium on Real-Time and Hybrid Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11180. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01461-2_2

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