Monitors and Concurrent Pascal: A Personal History

@inproceedings{Hansen1993MonitorsAC,
  title={Monitors and Concurrent Pascal: A Personal History},
  author={Per Brinch Hansen},
  booktitle={HOPL Preprints},
  year={1993}
}
  • P. B. Hansen
  • Published in HOPL Preprints 1993
  • Computer Science
This is a personal history of the early development of the monitor concept and its implementation in the programming language Concurrent Pascal. The paper explains how monitors evolved from the ideas of Dahl, Dijkstra, Hoare, and the author (1971--1973). At Caltech the author and his students developed and implemented Concurrent Pascal and used it to write several model operating systems (1974--1975). A portable implementation of Concurrent Pascal was widely distributed and used for system… 
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42 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
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Background Citations
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Methods Citations
10
Results Citations
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42 Citations

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References

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TLDR
The main contribution of Concurrent Pascal is to extend the monitor concept with an explicit hierarchy of access rights to shared data structures that can be stated in the program text and checked by a compiler.
Use of concurrent Pascal in systems programming teaching
TLDR
The aims and contents of the courses, and their impact on participants abilities as system designers and programmers are described, and alternatives to Concurrent Pascal are discussed.
Experience with Modular Concurrent Programming
  • P. B. Hansen
  • Computer Science
    IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
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TLDR
This paper summarizes the initial experience with the programming language Concurrent Pascal in the design of three model operating systems and emphasizes that the creative aspect of program construction is the initial selection of modules and the connection of them into hierarchical structures.
Experience with processes and monitors in Mesa
TLDR
These problems are addressed by the facilities described here for concurrent programming in Mesa, and experience with several substantial applications gives us some confidence in the validity of the solutions.
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This paper presents a medium‐sized operating system written in Concurrent Pascal, thereby describing further experience with this language and giving further indications of its scope. The operating…
A FORTRAN implementation of Concurrent Pascal
TLDR
The transportation of sequential and concurrent Pascal from the SOLO distribution tape to a non‐PDP‐11 like mainframe (IBM 370/145) and an interpreter for the idealized virtual machine was written in FORTRAN.
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TLDR
This work concludes 5 years of experience with the first abstract language for concurrent programming, Concurrent Pascal, used on a PDP 11/55 minicomputer since spring 1979.
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TLDR
The evolution of language features for multiprogramming from event queues and semaphores to critical regions and monitors is described and it is suggested that the choice of language concepts should be guided by two simple principles.
Monitors: an operating system structuring concept
This paper develops Brinch-Hansen's concept of a monitor as a method of structuring an operating system. It introduces a form of synchronization, describes a possible method of implementation in…
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TLDR
This paper identifies the major concepts and describes some of the more important language notations for writing concurrent programs and three general classes of concurrent programming languages are identified and compared.
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