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Teaching Academic Concurrency to Amazing Students

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Book cover Models, Algorithms, Logics and Tools

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10460))

Abstract

Milner’s CCS is a cornerstone of concurrency theory. This paper presents CCS as a cornerstone of concurrency practice. CCS is the semantic footing of pseuCo, an academic programming language designed to teach concurrent programming. The language features a heavily simplified Java-like look and feel. It supports shared-memory as well as message-passing concurrent programming primitives, the latter being inspired by the Go programming language. The behaviour of pseuCo programs is described by a formal translational semantics mapping on value-passing CCS and made executable using compilation to Java. pseuCo is not only a language but an interactive experience: provides access to a web application designed for first hands-on experiences with CCS and with concurrent programming patterns, supported by a rich and growing toolset. It provides an environment for students to experiment with and understand the mechanics of the fundamental building blocks of concurrency theory and concurrent programming based on a complete model of the program behaviour. Altogether this implements the TACAS (Teaching Academic Concurrency to Amazing Students) vision.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://cadp.inria.fr/man/aut.html.

  2. 2.

    There are some corner cases requiring careful analysis. We omit them due to scope and space constraints.

  3. 3.

    Reflexive and symmetric pairs are omitted directly for precision (by construction a memory access cannot race with itself) and efficiency reasons.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the ERC Advanced Investigators Grant 695614 (POWVER) and by the CDZ project CAP (GZ 1023).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Saarland University, Saarland Informatics Campus, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Sebastian Biewer, Felix Freiberger, Pascal Leo Held & Holger Hermanns

  2. Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Sebastian Biewer & Felix Freiberger

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  1. Sebastian Biewer
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  2. Felix Freiberger
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  3. Pascal Leo Held
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  4. Holger Hermanns
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Holger Hermanns .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Reykjavik University, Reykjavik, Iceland

    Luca Aceto

  2. Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Giorgio Bacci

  3. Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Giovanni Bacci

  4. Reykjavík University, Reykjavik, Iceland

    Anna Ingólfsdóttir

  5. Inria Campus Beaulieu, Rennes, France

    Axel Legay

  6. Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Radu Mardare

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Biewer, S., Freiberger, F., Held, P.L., Hermanns, H. (2017). Teaching Academic Concurrency to Amazing Students. In: Aceto, L., Bacci, G., Bacci, G., Ingólfsdóttir, A., Legay, A., Mardare, R. (eds) Models, Algorithms, Logics and Tools. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10460. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63121-9_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63121-9_9

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