The logic of message passing

Abstract

Message passing is a key ingredient of concurrent programming. The purpose of this paper is to describe the equivalence between the proof theory, the categorical semantics, and term calculus of message passing. In order to achieve this we introduce the categorical notion of a linear actegory and the related polycategorical notion of a poly-actegory. Not surprisingly the notation used for the term calculus borrows heavily from the (synchronous) pi-calculus. The cut elimination procedure for the system provides an operational semantics.