Applying Pi:
Towards a Basis for Concurrent Imperative Programming

Martin Odersky

Proc. ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on State in Programming Languages, January 1995

Most programming languages in use today have some way to express
concurrent execution of processes -- either in the language itself or
by means of a library. This paper proposes a formal basis for reasoning
about such languages.

We study an extension of asynchronous pi-calculus where names can be
returned from processes. We show that with this simple extension an
extensive range of functional, state-based and control-based
programming constructs can be expressed by concise macro expansions,
similar to Church-encodings in lambda calculus.