ICPL

Abstract

This paper describes an Initial Concurrent Programming Language (ICPL) used to teach fundamental and general concepts and principles that underpin the concurrent programming language paradigm. ICPL has been specifically designed to be simple to implement yet powerful enough to allow many of the basic properties of concurrent systems to be demonstrated directly. ICPL builds directly on an initial knowledge of a block-structured imperative language and introduces the notion of send and receive operations as a basis for message passing between processes. The message passing properties of ICPL are chosen deliberately to demonstrate a complementary approach to describing concurrent systems in terms of processes accessing shared variables via monitors.