TCMs and concurrent semantics (TCM_TF)

[matthew@verisity.com]

allow me then to put myself up for election to the coveted position to
lead the TCM taskforce. i don't believe this task force should be
rolled into one of the others although its work has to inform, and be
informed by, the TE_TF and HDL_TF -- the latter because an external
entity may provide the timekeeper for an e program. if there is
insufficient interest at this time in TCM_TF its work will be done
(badly!) by these other groups. so, please join in...

concurrency in "e" may be loosely described as "asynchronous processes
communicating through shared variables" -- something Dijkstra talked
a lot about at one time (spawning much research into "safer" modes of
inter-process communication and synchronisation, but that's another
story). we can readily capture the operational semantics of concurrent
"e" in a form suitable for implementors to work with, as well as
capturing the intended semantics for the edification of users.

about myself: i have been with Verisity since 1998 and have worked on
the semantics of temporal "e", and the concurrent language fragment; i
currently lead the synthesis team. before coming to Verisity i worked
at Leeds University in the UK with Prof. Graham Birtwistle looking at
formal models for asynchronous hardware; before that i worked with
Prof. Axel Poigne in Bonn looking at Esterel and other fun synchronous
programming languages, and developed a (rather good at the time!)
compiler for pure Esterel. i obtained my PhD (emphasis on theory of
concurrency, programming language semantics, and applied formal
methods) from the University of Edinburgh (1996).

M
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