Language Primitives and Type Discipline for Structured Communication-Based Programming Revisited: Two Systems for Higher-Order Session Communication

We introduce basic language constructs and a type discipline as a foundation of structured communication-based concurrent programming. The constructs, which are easily translatable into the summation-less asynchronous π-calculus, allow programmers to organise programs as a combination of multiple flows of (possibly unbounded) reciprocal interactions in a simple and elegant way, subsuming the preceding communication primitives such as method invocation and rendez-vous. The resulting syntactic structure is exploited by a type discipline a la ML, which offers a high-level type abstraction of interactive behaviours of programs as well as guaranteeing the compatibility of interaction patterns between processes in a well-typed program. After presenting the formal semantics, the use of language constructs is illustrated through examples, and the basic syntactic results of the type discipline are established. Implementation concerns are also addressed.