Paper Details

%T Representation and Implementation of CSP and VCR Traces
%A Neil C.C. Brown, Marc L. Smith
%E Peter H. Welch, S. Stepney, F.A.C Polack, Frederick R. M. Barnes, Alistair A. McEwan, G. S. Stiles, Jan F. Broenink, Adam T. Sampson
%B Communicating Process Architectures 2008
%X Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) was developed
   around a formal algebra of processes and a semantics based
   on traces (and failures and divergences). A trace is a
   record of the events engaged in by a process. Several
   programming languages use, or have libraries to use, CSP
   mechanisms to manage their concurrency. Most of these lack
   the facility to record the trace of a program. A standard
   trace is a flat list of events but structured trace models
   are possible that can provide more information such as the
   independent or concurrent engagement of the process in
   some of its events. One such trace model is View\-Centric
   Reasoning (VCR), which offers an additional model of
   tracing, taking into account the multiple, possibly
   imperfect views of a concurrent computation. This paper also
   introduces <q>structural</q> traces, a new type
   of trace that reflects the nested parallelism in a
   CSP system. The paper describes the automated generation of
   these three trace types in the Communicating Haskell
   Processes (CHP) library, using techniques which could easily
   be applied in other libraries such as JCSP and C++CSP2. The
   ability to present such traces of a concurrent program
   assists in understanding the behaviour of real CHP programs
   and for debugging when the trace behaviours are wrong. These
   ideas and tools promote a deeper understanding of
   the association between practicalities of real systems
   software and the underlying CSP formalism.

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