We discuss for the concept of promises within a framework that can be applied to either humans or technology. We compare promises to the more established notion of obligations and find promises to be both simpler and more effective at reducing uncertainty in behavioural outcomes.
Earlier work on program and thread algebra detailed the functional, observable behavior of programs under execution. In this article we add the modeling of unobservable, mechanistic processing, in particular processing due to jump instructions. We mo
del mechanistic processing preceding some further behavior as a delay of that behavior; we borrow a unary delay operator from discrete time process algebra. We define a mechanistic improvement ordering on threads and observe that some threads do not have an optimal implementation.
