“Sometimes” and “not never” revisited: on branching versus linear time temporal logic

  • Authors:
  • E. Allen Emerson;Joseph Y. Halpern

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of Texas, Austin;IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, CA

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the ACM (JACM) - The MIT Press scientific computation series
  • Year:
  • 1986

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Abstract

The differences between and appropriateness of branching versus linear time temporal logic for reasoning about concurrent programs are studied. These issues have been previously considered by Lamport. To facilitate a careful examination of these issues, a language, CTL*, in which a universal or existential path quantifier can prefix an arbitrary linear time assertion, is defined. The expressive power of a number of sublanguages is then compared. CTL* is also related to the logics MPL of Abrahamson and PL of Harel, Kozen, and Parikh. The paper concludes with a comparison of the utility of branching and linear time temporal logics.