Taxonomy and Expressiveness of Preemption: A Syntactic Approach

We propose a taxonomy of preemptive (suspensive and abortive) operators capturing the intuition of such operators that exist in the various synchronous languages. Some of the main contributions of the paper are: a precise notion of preemption is established at a structural level; we show that the class of suspensive operators is strictly more expressive than abortive operators, and we show that suspension is primitive while abortion is not