A logical theory of concurrent objects

José Meseguer
1990 SIGPLAN notices  
A new theory of concurrent objects is presented. The theory has the important advantage of being based directly on a logic called rewriting logic in which concurrent objectoriented computation exactly corresponds to logical deduction. This deduction is performed by concurrent rewriting modulo structural axioms of associativity, commutativity and identity that capture abstractly the essential aspects of communication in a distributed object-oriented configuration made up of concurrent objects
more » ... messages. Thanks to this axiomatization, it becomes possible to study the behavior of concurrent objects by formal methods in a logic intrinsic to their computation. The relationship with Actors and with other models of concurrent computation is also discussed. A direct fruit of this theory is a new language, called Maude, to program concurrent object-oriented modules in an entirely declarative way using rewriting logic; modules writte:l in this language are used to illustrate the main ideas with examples. Maude contains OBJ3 as a functional sublanguage and provides a simple and semantically rigorous integration of functional programming and concurrent object-oriented programming.
doi:10.1145/97946.97958 fatcat:xn5kesgm4fgutfwdtrl5atnojy