A generic type system for the Pi-calculus

We propose a general, powerful framework of type systems for the pi-calculus, and show that we can obtain as its instances a variety of type systems guaranteeing non-trivial properties like deadlock-freedom and race-freedom. A key idea is to express types and type environments as abstract processes: We can check various properties of a process by checking the corresponding proper-ties of its type environment. The framework clarifies the essence of recent complex type systems, and it also enables sharing of a large amount of work such as a proof of type preservation, making it easy to develop new type systems. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.