The paper proposes a theoretical study of a coordination language embodying Linda's asynchronous communication primitive with a refined matching mechanism based on pairs composed of attribute names associated with their values. Computations in this language are described by means of an operational semantics, reporting the whole traces of executions. The non-compositionality of this intuitive operational semantics motivates the design of a compositional and fully abstract denotational semantics, which is then exploited for studying program equivalence in this setting.The authors thank K. Apt, M. Bonsangue, J.W. de Bakker, F. de Boer, E. de Vinck, E. Horita, J. Kok, U. Montanari, J. Rutten for stimulating discussions on the semantics of coordination languages.
