A Modular SOS for Action Notation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/brics.v6i56.20126Resumé
Modularity is an important pragmatic aspect of semanticdescriptions: good modularity is needed to allow the reuse of existing descriptions when extending or changing the described language. In denotational semantics, the issue of modularity has received much attention, and appropriate abstractions have been introduced, so that definitions of semantic functions may be independent of the details of how computations are modeled. In structural operational semantics (SOS), however, this issue has largely been neglected, and SOS descriptions of programming languages typically exhibit rather poor modularity; the original SOS given for Action Notation (the notation for the semantic entities used in action semantics) suffered from the same problem.
This paper recalls a recent proposal, called MSOS, for obtaining a high
degree of modularity in SOS, and presents an MSOS description of Action
Notation. Due to its modularity, the MSOS description pinpoints some
complications in the design of Action Notation, and should facilitate the
design of an improved version of the notation. It also provides a major
example of the applicability of the MSOS framework.
The reader is assumed to be familiar with conventional SOS and with
the basic concepts and constructs of Action Notation. The description
of Action Notation is formulated almost entirely in Casl, the common
algebraic specification language.
Downloads
Publiceret
1999-12-26
Citation/Eksport
Mosses, P. D. (1999). A Modular SOS for Action Notation. BRICS Report Series, 6(56). https://doi.org/10.7146/brics.v6i56.20126
Nummer
Sektion
Artikler
Licens
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).