Programming in the Pi-Calculus

Pict is a programming language in the ML tradition, formed by adding high-level derived forms and a powerful static type system to a tiny core language. The core, Milner’s pi-calculus, is becoming popular as a theoretical foundation for a broad class of concurrent computations. The goal in Pict is to identify and support idioms that arise naturally when these primitives are used to build working programs — idioms such as basic data structures, protocols for returning results, higherorder programming, selective communication, and concurrent objects. The type system integrates a number of features found in recent work on theoretical foundations for typed object-oriented languages: higher-order polymorphism, simple recursive types, subtyping, and a useful partial type inference algorithm. This is a tutorial introduction to Pict, with examples and exercises.

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