Foundations of Distributed Languages

This page contains material for my talks in the MATHFIT Instructional Meeting on Recent Advances in Semantics and Types for Concurrency: Theory & Practice to be held at Imperial College, London during July 7--9, 1998.

It is under construction, and may change at any time! Provisional copies of the slides are here.

A tutorial note on Applied Pi can now be found on my home page.

In the first lecture I shall give a rapid introduction to the Pi-calculus, discuss its use as a foundation for concurrent programming languages, and talk about problems that arise in the distributed setting. Background on the Pi calculus can be found in the introductory papers (in 2 parts; by Robin Milner, Joachim Parrow, and David Walker) and a more recent tutorial :

Chapters 1-3 of this are particularly relevant. The use of the Pi-calculus as the foundation for the concurrent programming language Pict is discussed in Some distributed issues are discussed in the main paper on the distributed join calculus: The second lecture will be divided into two parts. One part will address the problem of defining observational equivalences for concurrent programming languages, based on In the other part I will discuss how concurrent calculi and semantics can be used in the design of mobile agent infrastructure algorithms. Some material on this can be found in

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Peter Sewell