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Join Calculus

Many software languages now include primitives for parallelism. (For instance, the CSharp language has the 'asynch' key word that can wrap up a method invoation via a delegate.)

The Join Calculus is an elegant concurrent programming language. It is globally asynchronous but supports local imperative programing (including a functional subset as usual).

In Join Calculus, a function has more than one signature - all need actual parameters available, generally provided from different sources, before an instance of the body is run.

The set of signatures is called a chord.

//
//A simple join chord:
//
public class Buffer
{
  public async Put(char c);

  public char Get(bool f) & Put(char c) 
    { return (f) ? toupper(c):c; }
}

New concurrency primitives - asynch dispatch - now builtin to C Sharp and F Sharp.

Has been compiled to hardware by a couple of research projects.


51: (C) 2012-18, DJ Greaves, University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory.