We present a unified approach to evaluate the relative expressive power of process calculi. In particular, we identify a small set of criteria (that have already been somehow presented in the literature) that an encoding should satisfy to be considered a valid means for language comparison. We argue that the combination of such criteria is a valid proposal by noting that: (i) several well-known encodings appeared in the literature satisfy them; (ii) this notion is not trivial, because some known encodings do not satisfy all the criteria we have proposed: (iii) several well-known separation results can be formulated in terms of our criteria: and (iv) some widely believed (but never formally proved) separation results can be proved by using the criteria we propose. Moreover, the criteria defined induce general proof-techniques for separation results that can be easily instantiated to cover known case-studies. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Abstract. In this paper, we present a unified approach to evaluating the relative expressive power of process calculi. In particular, we identify a small set of criteria (that have already been somehow presented in the literature) that an encoding should satisfy to be considered a good means for language comparison. We argue that the combination of such criteria is a valid proposal by noting that: (i) the best known encodings appeared in the literature satisfy them; (ii) this notion is not trivial, because there exist encodings that do not satisfy all the criteria we have proposed; (iii) the best known separation results can be formulated in terms of our criteria; and (iv) some widely believed (but never formally proved) separation results can be proved by using the criteria we propose. Moreover, the way in which we prove known separation results is easier and more uniform than the way in which such results were originally proved.

In this paper, we study 16 communication primitives, arising from the combination of four useful programming features: synchronism (synchronous vs asynchronous primitives), arity (monadic vs polyadic data), communication medium (message passing vs shared dataspaces) and pattern-matching. Some of these primitives have already been used in at least one language which has appeared in the literature; however, to reason uniformly on such primitives, we plug them into a common framework based on the pi. By means of possibility/impossibility of 'reasonable' encodings, we compare every pair of primitives to obtain a hierarchy of languages based on their relative expressive power. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved