Event Location: School of Medicine, Seminar room 1

Abstract:
Session types are a formalism to model structured communication-based programming. A session type describes communication by specifying the type and direction of data exchanged between two parties. We show that session types are encodable in more primitive and foundational pi-calculus types. Besides providing an expressivity result, the encoding: (i) removes redundancies in the syntax of session types, and (ii) yields standard properties of session types as straightforward corollaries, exploiting the corresponding properties of standard typed pi-calculus. The robustness of the encoding is tested on a few extensions of session types, including subtyping, polymorphism, and higher-order communications. In this talk we present the encoding, some of its applications and recent developments.