@masterthesis{roles,
  author = {Raad, Azalea},
  title = {Smelling of Roses (ROles - Specification , Exploration, Scrutiny)},
  school = {Imperial College London},
  year = {2010},
  month = jun,
  type = {masterthesis},
  abstract = {As computer programs shift towards highly distributed and parallel environments, the importance of reliable and safe communication rises and hence the challenges of safe concurrent computing march to the forefront of modern computing research. One of the most prominent of these is the provision of a verification method for inter-process communication which has proven extremely challenging and has led to one of the most common bugs in concurrent computing - synchronisation bugs. Session types have been proposed as a means of solving this problem via efficient type-checking. Several variants of session types have been studied for various use-cases; these have all attempted to exploit the benefits of type checking by binding the interacting participants to strictly-typed protocols, forcing them to conform to the said protocol and hence guaranteeing the communication safety. However, these approaches have various constraints and limitations, and a more suitable solution is sought. This project specifies Roles, a language based on a form of session types suited to dynamic multiparty communication with a number of interesting and useful features. We define the syntax and the operational semantics of Roles, present its type system and conjecture about its properties before evaluating it with respect to contemporary approaches.}
}