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Deterministic Concurrency
Ian Holyer
and David Carter.
Technical Report CSTR-95-015, Department of Computer Science, University of
Bristol, June 1995. Full paper: 42134 bytes gzipped PostScript.
Abstract
Existing functional languages appear not to be suitable for
implementing systems which are inherently concurrent, such as operating system
environments or reactive systems. Adaptations to functional languages
developed to support such applications have in the past always involved the
introduction of non-determinism. This paper proposes an adaptation of a
functional language which provides concurrency without the introduction of
non-determinism or timing information, and indeed without any alteration to the
usual semantics, thus retaining the purely declarative nature of functional
programming.
The expressiveness of this deterministic form of concurrency is explored by
presenting and discussing outlines of designs for a file manager, a window
system and a process communication mechanism. Taken together, these
demonstrate the feasibility of a deterministic design for a complete
single-user concurrent working environment.
Dr. Ian Holyer,
ian@cs.bris.ac.uk. Last modified on Friday 7 July 1995 at 10:31.