There are various logic-based approaches to modelling concurrent programming. The use of logic for system development concerns both the specification step and the study of the operational aspects (through proof analysis and construction) of such development. This means that we have to consider different logical systems for different uses of logic. Moreover, we can also consider concurrency from both points of view: we want to reason and to specify systems where some concurrency aspects are involved, but also to have some operational interpretation of concurrency within logic (focusing on the concept of proof). For this purpose, it seems clear that we have to identify and to study, on the one hand, the role and the treatment of objects (representation, inheritance, modularity, communication, and so on) in this context, and, on the other hand, the interaction of work on proofs and concurrency with the Object-Oriented Programming paradigm.

The ECOOP’96 workshop on ‘Proof Theory of Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming’ took place in Linz, Austria, in July 1996. Its objective was to provide an integrated forum for the presentation of research and the exchange of ideas and experiences in the topics concerned with proofs, concurrency and object-oriented programming (specification, proof development, and so on). The call for papers for this Special Issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science can be considered to have been a natural scientific continuation of the workshop.

The papers selected for this Special Issue address some of the topics discussed in the workshop. They present different alternative frameworks that are effectively based on a proof-theoretic approach. They illustrate, from different points of view, the interest, potentialities and difficulties of dealing with such an approach in the design of object-based concurrent systems.

The pioneering work of Hewitt and Baker on the foundations of concurrency during the seventies has inspired the development of the actor model as a promising object-based framework for understanding open distributed systems. So far, theoretical research on actors has focused on identifying the basic primitives of the model and on characterising the operational behaviour of distributed programming languages in terms of actor components. In this paper, we show that the actor model can also be used as a faithful basis for rigorously designing open distributed systems. We argue that a proof-theoretic approach is better suited to this purpose. An abstract-data-type-like axiomatisation of the actor primitives is proposed to support composing and reasoning from specifications of actor communities within a temporal logical system.

This paper focuses on the use of linear logic as a specification language for the operational semantics of advanced concepts of programming such as concurrency and object-orientation. Our approach is based on a refinement of linear logic sequent calculi based on the proof-theoretic characterization of logic programming. A well-founded combination of higher-order logic programming and linear logic will be used to give an accurate encoding of the traditional features of concurrent object-oriented programming languages, whose corner-stone is the notion of encapsulation.

This paper unveils and motivates an ambitious programme of hidden algebraic research in software engineering. We begin with an outline of our general goals, continue with an overview of results, and conclude with a discussion of some future plans. The main contribution is powerful hidden coinduction techniques for proving behavioural correctness of concurrent systems, and several mechanical proofs are given using OBJ3. We also show how modularization, bisimulation, transition systems, concurrency and combinations of the functional, constraint, logic and object paradigms fit into hidden algebra.