Paper Details

HCSP: Imperative State and True Concurrency

Authors: Lawrence, Adrian E.

Abstract:

HCSP is an extension of CSPP which captures the semantics of hardware compilation. Because it is a superset of CSPP, it can describe both hardware and software and so is useful for co-design. The extensions beyond CSPP include: true concurrency; new hardware constructors; and a simple and natural way to represent imperative state. Both CSPP and HCSP were invented to cope with problems that arose while the author was trying to prove that the hardware that he had designed correctly implemented channels between a processor and an FPGA. Standard CSP did not capture priority, yet the circuits in the FPGA and the occam processes in the transputer both depended on priority for their correctness. The attempt to extend CSP rigorously to handle such problems of co-design has led to develoments that seem to have a much wider significance including a new way of unifying theories for imperative programming. This paper reports on the current state of HCSP and focuses on handling imperative state and true concurrency. The acceptance denotational semantics is described briefly.

Proceedings:

Communicating Process Architectures 2002, James S. Pascoe, Roger J. Loader, Vaidy S. Sunderam, 2002, pp 39 - 56 published by IOS Press, Amsterdam

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