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Concept
Communicating sequential processes
Summary
In computer science, communicating sequential processes (CSP) is a formal language for describing patterns of interaction in concurrent systems. It is a member of the family of mathematical theories of concurrency known as process algebras, or process calculi, based on message passing via channels. CSP was highly influential in the design of the occam programming language and also influenced the design of programming languages such as Limbo, RaftLib, Erlang, Go, Crystal, and Clojure's core.async.
CSP was first described in a 1978 article by Tony Hoare, but has since evolved substantially. CSP has been practically applied in industry as a tool for specifying and verifying the concurrent aspects of a variety of different systems, such as the T9000 Transputer, as well as a secure ecommerce system. The theory of CSP itself is also still the subject of active research, including work to increase its range of practical applicability (e.g., increasing the scale of the systems that can be tractably analyzed).
The version of CSP presented in Hoare's original 1978 article was essentially a concurrent programming language rather than a process calculus. It had a substantially different syntax than later versions of CSP, did not possess mathematically defined semantics, and was unable to represent unbounded nondeterminism. Programs in the original CSP were written as a parallel composition of a fixed number of sequential processes communicating with each other strictly through synchronous message-passing. In contrast to later versions of CSP, each process was assigned an explicit name, and the source or destination of a message was defined by specifying the name of the intended sending or receiving process. For example, the process
COPY = *[c:character; west?c → east!c]
repeatedly receives a character from the process named west and sends that character to process named east. The parallel composition
[west::DISASSEMBLE || X::COPY || east::ASSEMBLE]
assigns the names west to the DISASSEMBLE process, X to the COPY process, and east to the ASSEMBLE process, and executes these three processes concurrently.
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