Using atomic await commands to develop concurrent programs in Java

Abstract

Systematic techniques for dealing with concurrency can be very helpful in concurrent programming. In his concurrent programming text, Andrews [2] describes a technique for developing concurrent programs based on first developing solutions using course-grained atomic commands and atomic await primitives (which are usually not available in real programming environments), then systematically transforming the solution to an implementation that uses available synchronization primitives. Transformations are known for semaphores, conditional critical regions, and monitors. In this paper, transformations are given for the synchronization constructs provided by the Java programming language [1]. Familiarity with the basic facilities to support concurrency provided by Java is assumed.