Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming, Second Edition

Appendix A. The Pseudocode Notation

The algorithms are written in a pseudocode notation that is intended to be easy to translate into a programming language. It not only allows a language-independent presentation of the models and algorithms, but also enables us to abbreviate computations that are trivial for a programmer to supply. Examples are:

number[i] ← 1 + max(number)

in the bakery algorithm (Algorithm 5.2), and

for all other nodes

in the Byzantine Generals algorithm (Algorithm 12.2).

Structure

The title area gives the name and reference number of the algorithm. The following area is used for the declaration of global variables. Then come the statements of the processes. For two processes, which are named p and q, the statements are written in ...