Date: Wed 19 Nov
Time: 16.30
Place: room 214

Speaker: David Gilbert, Department of Computer Science, City University, UK
Title: Towards a general theory of action languages and interaction
Reference: Catuscia Palamidessi

Abstract. We present a general theory of action-based languages as a paradigm for the description of those computational systems which include elements of concurrency and networking, and extend this approach to describe distributed systems and also to describe the interaction of a system with an environment. As part of this approach we introduce the Action Language as a common model for the class of nondeterministic concurrent programming languages and define its intensional and interaction semantics. This semantics is specialised for programs with stores, and extended to describe distributed computations. We also briefly introduce Scc, a synchronous concurrent constraint language as an example of an action-based language, and illustrate its use in describing concurrent systems. This is joint work with Alexander Letichevsky, Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics, Ukraine [Action Language] and Jean-Marie Jacquet (U.Namur, Belgium), and Lubos Brim and Mojmir Kretinsky (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) [Scc]