An action semantics of standard ML

Watt, David A.

doi:10.1007/3-540-19020-1_30

Cited by 14 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…This idea was tested on Pascal [22] and Standard ML [28]. Again, these tests demonstrated that action semantics is usable.…”

Section: Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first such test was an ASD of Pascal developed by Peter and me [22]. This was followed by ASDs of various imperative, object-oriented, functional, and concurrent programming languages, including CCS and CSP [4], Java [3], and Standard ML [28]. In his book [17], Peter shows the incremental development of an ASD of a substantial subset of Ada, including tasks.…”

Section: Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Action Semantics in Retrospect

Watt

2009

Semantics and Algebraic Specification

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Abstract. This paper is a themed account of the action semantics project, which Peter Mosses has led since the 1980s. It explains his motivations for developing action semantics, the inspirations behind its design, and the foundations of action semantics based on unified algebras. It goes on to outline some applications of action semantics to describe real programming languages, and some efforts to implement programming languages using action semantics directed compiler generation. It concludes by outlining more recent developments and reflecting on the success of the action semantics project.

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“…This idea was tested on Pascal [22] and Standard ML [28]. Again, these tests demonstrated that action semantics is usable.…”

Section: Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Action Semantics in Retrospect

Watt

2009

Semantics and Algebraic Specification

Self Cite

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“…Static semantics (e.g., type-checking semantics) can be defined in inference-rule format as in Plotkin's lecture notes on SOS [12] and in Schmidt's textbook on typed programming languages [2], or in action notation as in Watt's work [9,10], becoming an essential part of a language specification.…”

Section: This Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hence, they can be straightforwardly extended and modified to reflect language design changes, and to reuse parts of an existing language definition for specifying similar, related languages. In fact, some real-world programming languages, such as Pascal [8], and Standard ML [9,10], have been successfully described in action semantics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Composing Programming Languages by Combining Action-Semantics Modules

Doh¹,

Mosses²

2003

BRICS

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This article demonstrates a method for composing a programming language by combining action-semantics modules. Each module is defined separately, and then a programming-language module is defined by combining existing modules. This method enables the language designer to gradually develop a language by defining, selecting and combining suitable modules. The resulting modular structure is substantially different from that previously employed in action-semantic descriptions.It also discusses how to resolve the conflicts that may arise when combining modules, and indicates some advantages that action semantics has over other approaches in this respect.

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“…Action Semantics [38,37,33,60,35, 321 is something of a mixture of the denotational, algebraic, and operational approaches to formal semantics. It has been under development since 1977, by the present author and (since 1984) David Watt.…”

Section: Expositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic Domains and Denotational Semantics

Gunter¹,

Mosses²,

Scott³

1989

DPB

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The theory of domains was established in order to have appropriate spaces on which to define semantic functions for the denotational approach to programming-language semantics. There were two needs: first, there had to be spaces of several different types available to mirror both the type distinctions in the languages and also to allow for different kinds of semantical constructs -especially in dealing with languages with side effects; and second, the theory had to account for computability properties of functions -if the theory was going to be realistic. The first need is complicated by the fact that types can be both compound (or made up from other types) and recursive (or self-referential), and that a high-level language of types and a suitable semantics of types is required to explain what is going on. The second need is complicated by these complications of the semantical definitions and the fact that it has to be checked that the level of abstraction reached still allows a precise definition of computability. Comments

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An action semantics of standard ML

Cited by 14 publications

References 2 publications

Action Semantics in Retrospect

Action Semantics in Retrospect

Composing Programming Languages by Combining Action-Semantics Modules

Semantic Domains and Denotational Semantics

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