Possible values: Exploring a concept for concurrency

Cliff B. Jones, Ian J. Hayes
2016 Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming  
An important issue in concurrency is interference. This issue manifests itself in both shared-variable and communication-based concurrency -this paper focuses on the former case where interference is caused by the environment of a process changing the values of shared variables. Rely/guarantee approaches have been shown to be useful in specifying and reasoning compositionally about concurrent programs. This paper explores the use of a "possible values" notation for reasoning about variables
more » ... e values can be changed multiple times by interference. Apart from the value of this concept in providing clear specifications, it offers a principled way of avoiding the need for some auxiliary (or ghost) variables whose unwise use can destroy compositionality.
doi:10.1016/j.jlamp.2016.01.002 fatcat:fshkywzuxzcuzogt47sjrtppke