Higher-order communications for concurrent programming (Q1067776)

The authors present an approach for the evaluation of recursive equations programs using communicating agents. The basic idea was first introduced by the authors': Complete Modal Theories for verifying communicating agents behaviour in recursive equations programs, CSR-128-83, Comput. Sci. Dept., Edinburgh Univ. Scotland (1983). They consider communications which are ''higher order'', that is, they consist in passing ''behaviours'', rather than values only. Those behaviours are essentially computations, and their knowledge makes agents to improve their efficiency. The executions of the resulting programs have high performances, and the proofs of their correctness use those communications as powerful lemmas.