Distributed PICT

PICT is a language, based on the $\pi$-calculus, designed by Pierce and Turner. PICT now has a stable public release; its design is described in [PT97]. Pierce, has moved from Cambridge to Indiana. Sewell, Wojciechowski, and Pierce (see section ), work on a study in more detail of the design, semantic definition and implementation of communication primitives by which mobile agents can interact. This has led to a prototype implementation, building on that of PICT, which is ongoing, as is work on reasoning, in particular on correctness and robustness results.

PICT has also been used to model concurrent objects. The view that general models of mobile processes, such as $\pi$-calculus and Higher-Order $\pi$-calculus, provide a good framework for the definition of a variety of concurrent object-oriented languages is illustrated in [LW97a]. A technique involving process continuations is used to give a natural and direct semantic definition for a language containing constructs for several kinds of inter-object communication. In the unpublished MSc dissertation [S97], Sawle gives a semantic definition to an experimental extension of Pict with actor primitives and implements a prototype. Sawle now studies for a PhD at Cambridge.

[[LW97a]] X. Liu and D. Walker,
Concurrent objects as mobile processes,
in Proof, Language and Interaction: Essays in Honour of Robin Milner, G. Plotkin, C. Stirling, and M. Tofte (eds.), MIT Press, to appear.

[[PT97]] Benjamin C. Pierce and David N. Turner.
Pict: A programming language based on the pi-calculus.
Technical Report CSCI 476, Computer Science Department, Indiana University, 1997.
To appear in Proof, Language and Interaction: Essays in Honour of Robin Milner, Gordon Plotkin, Colin Stirling, and Mads Tofte, editors, MIT Press.

[[S97]] M. Sawle,
A $\pi$-calculus semantics for actor systems,
MSc dissertation, University of Warwick, September 1997.