  Building on the standard theory of process algebra with priorities, we
identify a new scheduling mechanism, called "constructive reduction" which is
designed to capture the essence of synchronous programming. The distinctive
property of this evaluation strategy is to achieve determinacy-by-construction
for multi-cast concurrent communication with shared memory. In the technical
setting of CCS extended by clocks and priorities, we prove for a large class of
"coherent" processes a confluence property for constructive reductions. We show
that under some restrictions, called "pivotability", coherence is preserved by
the operators of prefix, summation, parallel composition, restriction and
hiding. Since this permits memory and sharing, we are able to cover a strictly
larger class of processes compared to those in Milner's classical confluence
theory for CCS without priorities.
