Join-calculus
The join-calculus is a process calculus developed at INRIA. The join-calculus was developed to provide a formal basis for the design of distributed programming languages, and therefore intentionally avoids communications constructs found in other process calculi, such as rendezvous communications, which are difficult to implement in a distributed setting. Despite this limitation, the join-calculus is as expressive as the full 
. Encodings of the -calculus in the join-calculus, and vice versa, have been demonstrated.
The join-calculus is a member of the family of process calculi, and can be considered, at its core, an asynchronous -calculus with several strong restrictions:
Scope restriction, reception, and replicated reception are syntactically merged into a single construct, the definition;
Communication occurs only on defined names;
For every defined name there is exactly one replicated reception.
However, as a language for programming, the join-calculus offers at least one convenience over the -calculus — namely the use of multi-way join patterns, the ability to match against messages from multiple channels simultaneously.
