Thread extraction for polyadic instruction sequences

TL;DR

This paper formalizes a mechanism for understanding how multiple instruction sequence fragments can jointly produce behavior, highlighting the complexity of translating such collections into a single instruction sequence.

Contribution

It introduces a formal model for the joint behavior of instruction sequence fragments and analyzes the complexity of translating them into a single sequence.

Findings

Instruction sequences can be split into fragments with joint behavior

Translating multiple fragments into a single sequence is non-trivial

Formal mechanisms can describe fragment interactions

Abstract

In this paper, we study the phenomenon that instruction sequences are split into fragments which somehow produce a joint behaviour. In order to bring this phenomenon better into the picture, we formalize a simple mechanism by which several instruction sequence fragments can produce a joint behaviour. We also show that, even in the case of this simple mechanism, it is a non-trivial matter to explain by means of a translation into a single instruction sequence what takes place on execution of a collection of instruction sequence fragments.