A software complexity perspective on nondeterminism used to support intertask communication

The authors discuss the effect of nondeterminism on Ada tasking programs and suggest measures aimed at quantifying the complexity contributed by this factor. Nondeterminism is identified as a key contributing factor to concurrent-software complexity. Using Ada as a model language allowing for intertask communication, the authors discuss language constructs contributing to nondeterminism and derive some complexity measures based on these programming constructs. A discussion of both theoretical and empirical evaluations of the measures is presented