Confluence in concurrent constraint programming

1997

Compositional semantics allow to reason about programs in an incremental way, providing the basis for the development of modular data-flow analysis. The major drawback of these semantics is their complexity. This observation applies in particular for concurren~ constralm programming ( ccp ). ln this work "-e consider an operational semantics of ccp by using sequences of pairs of finite constramts to represent ccp computatiOns which is equivalent to a denotational semantics, providing the basis for the development o.f an abstract interpretation framework for the analy~i~ of ccp .

Proceedings of the 18th …, 1991

Concurrent constraint programming Sar89,SR90] is a simple and powerful model of concurrent computation based on the notions of store-asconstraint and process as information transducer. The store-as-valuation conception of von Neumann computing is replaced by the notion that the store is a constraint (a nite representation of a possibly in nite set of valuations) which provides partial information about the possible values that variables can take. Instead of \reading" and \writing" the values of variables, processes may now ask (check if a constraint is entailed by the store) and tell (augment the store with a new constraint). This is a very general paradigm which subsumes (among others) nondeterminate data-ow and the (concurrent)(constraint) logic programming languages. This paper develops the basic ideas involved in giving a coherent semantic account of these languages. Our rst contribution is to give a simple and general formulation of the notion that a constraint system is a system of partial information (a la the information systems of Scott). Parameter passing and hiding is handled by borrowing ideas from the cylindric algebras of Henkin, Monk and Tarski to introduce diagonal elements and \cylindri cation" operations (which mimic the projection of information induced by existential quanti ers).

[1993] Proceedings Eighth Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science

We propose a framework for the analysis of concurrent constraint programming (ccp). Our approach is based on simple denotational semantics which approximate the usual semantics in the sense that they give a superset of the input-output relation of a ccp program. Analyses based on these semantics can be easily and efficiently implemented using standard techniques from the analysis of logic programs. 1 Introduction Concurrent constraint programming (ccp) [12, 13, 14] is a new programming paradigm which elegantly combines logical concepts and concurrency mechanisms. The computational model of ccp is based on the notion of constraint system, which consists of a set of constraints and an entailment (implication) relation. Processes interact through a common store. Communication is achieved by telling (adding) a given constraint to the store, and by *This work has been partially supported by ESPRIT BRA

The Journal of Logic Programming, 1997

The standard operational semantics of concurrent constraint logic languages is not confluent in the sense that different schedulings of processes may result in different program behaviors. While implementations are free to choose specific scheduling policies, analyses should be correct for all implementations. Moreover, in the presence of parallelism, it is usually not possible to determine how processes will actually be scheduled. Efficient program analysis is therefore difficult as all process schedulings must be considered. To overcome this problem, we introduce a confluent semantics which closely approximates the standard (nonconfluent) semantics. This semantics provides a basis for efficient and accurate program analysis for these languages. To illustrate the usefulness of this approach, we sketch analyses based on abstract interpretations of the confluent semantics which determine if a program is suspension-and local suspension-free. @ Elsevier Science Inc., 1997 <I 1. INTRODUCTION Concurrent constraint logic programming [24, 26] is a programming paradigm based on logic programming with mechanisms for concurrency. In recent years, there has

Theoretical Computer Science, 1997

Confluence is an important and desirable property as it allows the program to be understood by considering any desired scheduling rule, rather than having to consider all possible schedulings. Unfortunately, the usual operational semantics for concurrent constraint programs is not confluent as different process schedulings give rise to different sets of possible outcomes. We show that it is possible to give a natural confluent calculus for concurrent constraint programs, if the syntactic domain is extended by a blind choice operator and a special constant standing for a discarded branch. This has application to program analysis.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1994

Because of synchronization based on blocking ask, some of the most important techniques for data flow analysis of (sequential) constraint logic programs (clp) are no longer applicable to cc languages. In particular, the generalized approach to the semantics, intended to factorize the (standard) semantics so as to make explicit the domain-dependent features (i.e. operators and semantic objects which may be influenced by abstraction) becomes useless for relevant applications. A possible solution to this problem is based on a more abstract (non-standard) semantics: the success semantics, which models non suspended computations only. With a program transformation (NoSynch) that simply ignores synchronization, we obtain a clp-like program which allows us to apply standard techniques for data flow analysis. For suspension-free programs the success semantics is equivalent to the standard semantics thus justifying the use of suspension analysis to generate sound approximations. A second transformation (Angel ) is introduced, applying a different abstraction of synchronization in possibly suspending programs and resulting in a framework which is adequate to suspension analysis. Applicability and accuracy of these solutions are investigated.

BRICS Report Series, 2002

The tcc paradigm is a formalism for timed concurrent constraint programming. Several tcc languages differing in their way of expressing infinite behaviour have been proposed in the literature. In this paper we study the expressive power of some of these languages. In particular, we show that:&lt;dl compact=&quot;compact&quot;&gt;&lt;dt&gt;(1)&lt;/dt&gt;&lt;dd&gt;recursive procedures with parameters can be encoded into parameterless recursive procedures with dynamic scoping, and vice-versa.&lt;/dd&gt;&lt;dt&gt;(2)&lt;/dt&gt;&lt;dd&gt;replication can be encoded into parameterless recursive procedures with static scoping, and vice-versa.&lt;/dd&gt;&lt;dt&gt;(3)&lt;/dt&gt;&lt;dd&gt;the languages from (1) are strictly more expressive than the languages from (2).&lt;/dd&gt;&lt;/dl&gt;Furthermore, we show that behavioural equivalence is undecidable for the languages from (1), but decidable for the languages from (2). The undecidability result holds even if the process variables take values...

1995

Abstract. Concurrent Constraint Programming (CCP) has been the subject of growing interest as the focus of a new paradigm for concurrent computation. Like logic programming it claims close relations to logic. In fact CCP languages are logics in a certain sense that we make precise in this paper.

Information and Computation, 2001

In this paper we give a logical semantics for the class CC of concurrent constraint programming languages and for its extension LCC based on linear constraint systems. Besides the characterization in intuitionistic logic of the stores of CC computations, we show that both the stores and the successes of LCC computations can be characterized in intuitionistic linear logic. We illustrate the usefulness of these results by showing with examples how the phase semantics of linear logic can be used to give simple "semantical" proofs of safety properties of LCC programs.

1999

Concurrent constraint programming is classically based on asynchronous communication via a shared store. In previous work ([1, 2]), we presented a new version of the ask and tell primitives which features synchronicity, our approach being based on the idea of telling new information just in the case that a concurrently running process is asking for it. We turn in this paper to a semantic study of this new framework, called Scc. It is first shown to be different in nature from classical concurrent constraint programming and from CCS, a classical reference in traditional concurrency theory. This suggests the interest of new semantics for Scc. To that end, an operational semantics reporting the steps of the computations is presented. A denotational semantics is then proposed. It uses monotonic sequences of labelled pairs of input-output states, possibly containing gaps, and ending – according to the logic programming tradition – with marks reporting success or failure. This denotationa...