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Playing with Bisimulation in Erlang

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Models, Languages, and Tools for Concurrent and Distributed Programming

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11665))

Abstract

Erlang is a functional and concurrent programming language. The aim of this paper is to investigate basic properties of the Erlang concurrency model, which is based on asynchronous communication through mailboxes accessed via pattern matching. To achieve this goal, we consider Core Erlang (which is an intermediate step in Erlang compilation) and we define, on top of its operational semantics, an observational semantics following the approach used to define asynchronous bisimulation for the \(\pi \)-calculus. Our work allows us to shed some light on the management of process identifiers in Erlang, different from the various forms of name mobility already studied in the literature. In fact, we need to modify standard definitions to cope with such specific features of Erlang.

This work has been partially supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR), project DCore n. ANR-18-CE25-0007.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Focus Team, University of Bologna/Inria, Bologna, Italy

    Ivan Lanese, Davide Sangiorgi & Gianluigi Zavattaro

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  1. Ivan Lanese
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  2. Davide Sangiorgi
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  3. Gianluigi Zavattaro
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Correspondence to Gianluigi Zavattaro .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Statistics, Computer Science, Applications, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Michele Boreale

  2. School of Science and Technology, University of Camerino, Camerino, Italy

    Flavio Corradini

  3. School of Science and Technology, University of Camerino, Camerino, Italy

    Michele Loreti

  4. Department of Statistics, Computer Science, Applications, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Rosario Pugliese

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Lanese, I., Sangiorgi, D., Zavattaro, G. (2019). Playing with Bisimulation in Erlang. In: Boreale, M., Corradini, F., Loreti, M., Pugliese, R. (eds) Models, Languages, and Tools for Concurrent and Distributed Programming. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11665. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21485-2_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21485-2_6

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