A Note on Compositional Refinement

Implementing a (concurrent) program P often requires changing the syntactic structure of P at various levels. We argue and illustrate that in such a situation a natural framework for implementation correctness requires a more general notion of refinement than that of [HHS87], a notion which involves the introduction of separate refinement relations for P’s various abstract components. An outline is given of a formal framework for proving implementation correctness that involves these notions.

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