A Calculus of Communicating Systems
A Calculus of Communicating Systems
Accent: A communication oriented network operating system kernel
SOSP '81 Proceedings of the eighth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Instruction set processor specifications (ISPS): the notation and its applications
IEEE Transactions on Computers
IBM Journal of Research and Development
Integrated Environments for Formally Well-Founded Design and Simulation of Concurrent Systems
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
IDEOSY: An Ideographic and Interactive Program Description System
SDE 1 Proceedings of the first ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN software engineering symposium on Practical software development environments
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In this paper we discuss our approach to a formal description of the UNIX operating system [Rit78a] [Rit78b] [Tho78], using Milner's Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS) [Mil80]. The paper focuses on the problems one encounters and the decisions one has to make when describing a system such as UNIX. We believe that the problems that arise in defining such a system are much less well understood than those, for example, related to the formalization of programming languages. In particular, this work is intended to serve several different purposes. One is an extensive test of the capabilities of CCS. We are applying CCS to the description of a moderately large system. This exercise has uncovered many shortcomings of the formalism; some of these we have overcome, while others are the subject of continuing research. For example, an important and difficult problem is the lack of any direct means of communicating ports as values.