Communicating sequential processes

In computer science, communicating sequential processes (CSP) is a formal language for describing patterns of interaction in concurrent systems. It is a member of the family of mathematical theories of concurrency known as process algebras, or process calculi, based on message passing via channels. CSP was highly influential in the design of the occam programming language and also influenced the design of programming languages such as Limbo, RaftLib, Erlang, Go, Crystal, and Clojure's core.async. CSP was first described by Tony Hoare in a 1978 article, and has since evolved substantially. CSP has been practically applied in industry as a tool for specifying and verifying the concurrent aspects of a variety of different systems, such as the T9000 Transputer, as well as a secure e-commerce system. The theory of CSP itself is also still the subject of active research, including work to increase its range of practical applicability (e.g., increasing the scale of the systems that can be tractably analyzed).