July 2014
Intermediate to advanced
554 pages
17h 49m
English
Chapter 4
Syntax and Semantics
This chapter introduces a minimal set of notations to represent distributed algorithms. These notations do not always conform to the syntax of popular programming languages like C or Java. They are only useful to appropriately specify certain key issues of atomicity, nondeterminism, and scheduling in a succinct way. The notations have enough flexibility to accommodate occasional use of even word specifications for representing actions. These specifications are only meant for a human user who is trying to implement the system or reason about its correctness. In [D76], Dijkstra argued about the importance of such a language to influence our thinking habits. This ...