Fairness

The main purpose of this book is to bring together much of the research conducted in recent years in a subject I find both fascinating and impor­ tant, namely fairness. Much of the reported research is still in the form of technical reports, theses and conference papers, and only a small part has already appeared in the formal scientific journal literature. Fairness is one of those concepts that can intuitively be explained very brieft.y, but bear a lot of consequences, both in theory and the practicality of programming languages. Scientists have traditionally been attracted to studying such concepts. However, a rigorous study of the concept needs a lot of detailed development, evoking much machinery of both mathemat­ ics and computer science. I am fully aware of the fact that this field of research still lacks matu­ rity, as does the whole subject of theoretical studies of concurrency and nondeterminism. One symptom of this lack of maturity is the proliferation of models used by the research community to discuss these issues, a variety lacking the invariance property present, for example, in universal formalisms for sequential computing.