A New Approach to Proving the Correctness of Multiprocess Programs

  • Authors:
  • Leslie Lamport

  • Affiliations:
  • SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Avenue, 415 Menlo Park, CA

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
  • Year:
  • 1979

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Abstract

A new, nonassertional approach to proving multiprocess program correctness is described by proving the correctness of a new algorithm to solve the mutual exclusion problem. The algorithm is an improved version of the bakery algorithm. It is specified and proved correct without being decomposed into indivisible, atomic operations. This allows two different implementations for a conventional, nondistributed system. Moreover, the approach provides a sufficiently general specification of the algorithm to allow nontrivial implementations for a distributed system as well.