| | |
Summary: This is a preprint of a paper that will appear in the Proceedings of the 24th
Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer
Science (FSTTCS 2004), Chennai, India, December 16, 2004 c
Springer-Verlag.
Toward a Grainless Semantics for
Shared-Variable Concurrency ?
John C. Reynolds
Carnegie Mellon University
and
Edinburgh University
john.reynolds@cs.cmu.edu
Abstract. Conventional semantics for shared-variable concurrency suf-
fers from the \grain of time" problem, i.e., the necessity of specifying a
default level of atomicity. We propose a semantics that avoids any such
choice by regarding all interference that is not controlled by explicit crit-
ical regions as catastrophic. It is based on three principles:
{ Operations have duration and can overlap one another during exe-
cution.
{ If two overlapping operations touch the same location, the meaning
of the program execution is \wrong".
|
