On the π-calculus and Co-intuitionistic Logic. Notes on Logic for Concurrency and λP Systems

Abstract

We reconsider work by Bellin and Scott in the 1990s on R. Milner and S. Abramsky's encoding of linear logic in the π-calculus and give an account of efforts to establish a tight connection between the structure of proofs and of the cut elimination process in multiplicative linear logic, on one hand, and the input-output behaviour of the processes that represent them, on the other, resulting in a proof-theoretic account of a variant of Chu's construction. But Milner's encoding of the linear lambda calculus suggests consideration of multiplicative co-intuitionistic linear logic: we provide a term assignment for it, a calculus of coroutines which presents features of concurrent and distributed computing. Finally, as a test case of its adequacy as a logic for distributed computation, we represent our term assignment as a λP system. We argue that translations of typed functional languages in concurrent and distributed systems such as π-calculi or λP systems are best typed with co-intuitionistic logic, where some features of computations match the logical properties in a natural way.