Metric semantics for concurrency (Q1113660)

This paper contains a survey of the work of the authors and their colleagues in the Amsterdam concurrency group on metric semantics for various constructs involving nondeterminism and parallelism. For each of several languages an operational and denotational semantics is given. The operational semantics is given in terms of transitions, and the denotational semantics which make use of environments. Both kinds of semantics involve contractions on metric spaces. The following constructs are treated: recursion and merge; synchronization and global nondeterminacy; process creation and communication with value passing. Various complete metric spaces play important parts, the basic ones being the set \(A^{\infty}\) of finite and infinite words on a set A and the nonempty closed subsets of \(A^{\infty}.\) The paper is well written, although the notations become quite complex at times.