dc.contributor.author Weber, Sam en_US dc.contributor.author Bloom, Bard en_US dc.date.accessioned 2007-04-23T18:05:33Z dc.date.available 2007-04-23T18:05:33Z dc.date.issued 1996-01 en_US dc.identifier.citation http://techreports.library.cornell.edu:8081/Dienst/UI/1.0/Display/cul.cs/TR96-1564 en_US dc.identifier.uri https://hdl.handle.net/1813/7221 dc.description.abstract Milner's {$\pi$}-calculus is a very influential process algebra in which communication channels are first-class objects. One of the basic concepts in the language is the transmission of one channel along another. This leads to immensely powerful programming techniques, which have been used for modelling things from cellular telephones to object-oriented languages. However, the {$\pi$}-calculus lacks many operations, such as broadcasting a value to many processes, interrupting processes, checkpointing, and even such basics as sequencing and \t{while}-loops in full generality. Adding all useful operations to the {$\pi$}-calculus would make it unusably large and complex. We thus propose a \e{rule format}, called \metapi. The {$\pi$}-calculus, and a vast range of other calculi treating channels as first-class data, can be expressed with {\metapi} rules. Any operations defined by {\metapi} rules have the same essential theory as the {$\pi$}-calculus. For example, all such operations respect the appropriate notion of strong bisimulation. Furthermore, the {$\pi$}-calculus, and all the operations in the previous paragraph, have {\metapi} equivalents. {\metapi} describes the heart of the {$\pi$}-calculus without prejudice towards the particular communication mechanisms of the calculus, and thus gives a general framework for working with {$\pi$}-like calculi. Further, it can be argued that the {\metapi} rule format is the most general of its kind, in the sense that any obvious extensions to the format would cause important language properties to be violated. en_US dc.format.extent 238963 bytes dc.format.extent 261016 bytes dc.format.mimetype application/pdf dc.format.mimetype application/postscript dc.language.iso en_US en_US dc.publisher Cornell University en_US dc.subject computer science en_US dc.subject technical report en_US dc.title Metatheory of the $\pi$-Calculus en_US dc.type technical report en_US
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