2016-11-17

# Semantic methods

Refinement overview

Since CSP is a formal method, it’s not surprising that Roscoe spends a large part of his textbook talking about how to use rigorous mathematics to talk about processes. He actually goes one step (er, two?) further and defines three different ways to do so:

• The denotational semantics defines (mathematically, using sets and sequences) what the behavior of a process is. Each CSP operator comes with a rule for how to calculate a process’s behavior recursively — that is, in terms of the behavior of its operands. (So for example, the “external choice” rule tells you how to define the behavior of $$P \mathrel{\Box} Q$$ in terms of the behavior of $$P$$ and $$Q$$.)

• The algebraic semantics tell you to not worry about what a process “means” or what it “does”. Instead, it provides a list of rewrite rules that let you change what the definition of a process looks like without changing its behavior.

• The operational semantics say that a process is nothing more than a state machine, with nodes representing processes (and subprocesses) and edges representing the events that allow you to transition between them. We can learn anything important about a process just by interpreting or analyzing this state machine.

One of the important contributions of the book is to not just describe these three different semantic methods (in detail), but to show that they’re equivalent. This is great, because all three semantics are useful in different situations:

• The denotational semantics are where the concept of refinement is actually defined, where we have the best intuition about what it means, and give us a language for describing counterexamples.

• The algebraic semantics give us a way to simplify processes by “turning the crank”; we make superficial syntactic transformations to a process in a way that hopefully leads us to a simpler definition.

• The operational semantics give us a data structure for representing processes that is easy to program with.

And more importantly, we’re going to pick and choose the most useful pieces of each semantic method as part of the refinement algorithm that we described in the previous post:

1. Load in a description of the $$Spec$$ and $$Impl$$ processes, transforming them each into a labeled transition system (LTS) (using the rules from the operational semantics).

2. Normalize the $$Spec$$ process, resulting in a normalized LTS (using the normalization operation from the algebraic semantics).

3. Perform a simultaneous breadth-first search through the $$Spec$$’s normalized LTS and $$Impl$$’s (non-normalized) LTS, looking for a counterexample to the refinement (taking advantage of the fact that the operational and denotational semantics are equivalent).

4. If we find any counterexample, the refinement check fails. If we don’t, the refinement check succeeds. (In either case, we describe the result in terms of the denotational semantics.)

Lazy processes