Can the Lambda Calculus or Turing Machines model signals, callbacks, sleep/wait, or buses?

I have a deep appreciation for formalisms like the Turing Machine and the $\lambda$-Calculus, and enjoy studying them and learning more about how they relate to physical computers. I am now learning about writing GUI programs, and the graphical library (GTK) relies on things like signals and callbacks, which I have not seen modeled by either Turing Machines or the $\lambda$-Calculus; can either the $\lambda$-Calculus or Turing Machines model things like signals, callbacks, sleeping/waiting, or buses? If so, where can I find some good reference material to learn more? If not, why not? and are there any formalisms which are capable of expressing such things?

Yes, there are natural extensions of the $\lambda$-calculus for handling I/O, parallelism, concurrency, exceptions, timeouts, etc. In general such things are viewed as computational effects and there is a rich theory of $\lambda$-calculus for computational effects. This is what Haskell monads are about -- Haskell is $\lambda$-calculus extended with features that you are asking about.

But let me point out that you mix a bunch of features together which are really of two different kinds:

• Interaction with external environment: I/O, communication, timeouts, concurrency, etc.

• Programming models: callbacks, semaphores, shared memory, parallelism, etc.

A classical Turing machine does not interact with an external environment, but it can be modified to do so. For instance, an oracle is essentially an input stream. The so-called "type 2 machines" are Turing machines with infinite input and output tapes which correspond to an input and an output channel, etc. I am sure someone invented "real-time Turing machines", but I think such endaveours miss the point of mathematical models of computation. A mathematical model is designed specifically to fit well a chosen set of features that we want to model. Turing machines were invented to explain what "possible to compute" means, not "how to compute". If you want to model I/O and such then there are better mathematical models to stick to ($\pi$-calculus was suggested by someone).

The second set of features you asked about is really a bunch of programming methods. As is well known, any Turing complete computational model can be used to simulate any other such model. For instance, a Turing machine can compute things in parallel through a technique known as dovetailing. I would not be surprised if dovetailing was invented several decades before the first parallel operating sytem came into existence. (In fact, it must be the case that dovetailing appreaded already in Turing's original 1936 paper, can someone confirm this?)

Callbacks are well known to functional programers, as these are just functions (but if you spend your life programming operating systems in C you will think they are special), while threads and coroutines are known as continuations. So some concepts that look fancy from one perspective are basic and straightforward from another. Another that comes to mind is the object-oriented idea of an "iterator" which gets vastly generalized in functional programming.

StackExchange Computer Science Q#12771, answer score: 3