Fail-safety techniques and their extensions to concurrent systems

Abstract

Fail-safety is a system attribute which ensures that a program either completes its execution satisfying its post-conditions in the normal manner or signals its failure to do so to its operating environment. Such an attribute is desirable of any system as it ensures the correctness of results which are produced. A very few modern sequential programming languages offer program fail-safety through the judicious use of a well designed exception handling mechanism. In this paper the exception handling techniques used in those sequential systems are developed to provide the guidelines for fail-safe concurrent system design.