Transformation of occam programs
Michael H. Goldsmith, Andrew William Roscoe · 1988
The value of formal techniques in conventional software engineering is starting to gain recognition even outside academic computer science departments. We maintain that their use is essential in taming the extra complexity that accompanies the extra power that concurrency brings: for while in a FORTRAN program, say, the contribution of the 'program counter' to the number of states that need to be considered is the sum of the contributions of its component modules, in a highly parallel program it is their product. Various paradigms of parallel programming have been suggested, all with much the same expressive power. The authors deal with one of the most tractable: synchronising communications. The authors describe their work on formal manipulation of occam, and give an example of a practical application of program transformation techniques.