Concurrent Programming from pseuCo to Petri

The growing importance of concurrent programming has made practical concurrent software development become a cornerstone of many computer science curricula. Since a few years, a sound bridge from concurrency theory to concurrence practice is available in the form of pseuCo, a light-weight programming language featuring both message passing and shared memory concurrency. That language is at the core of an award-winning lecture at Saarland Informatics Campus. This paper presents a novel two-step semantic mapping from pseuCo programs to colored Petri nets, developed for the sake of further strengthening the educational concept behind pseuCo. The approach is fully integrated in Open image in new window , our open-source teaching tool for pseuCo, empowering students to interact with the Petri-net-based semantics of pseuCo. In addition, we present a source-level exploration tool for pseuCo, also based on this semantics, that gives users an IDE-like debugging experience while enabling full control over the nondeterminism inherent in their programs. The debugger is also part of Open image in new window , allowing students to access it without any set-up.