ENGLISH

Comparative Metric Semantics of Programming Languages: Nondeterminism and Recursion

By Franck van Breugel

Book information

Publisher
Birkhäuser Basel
Year
1996
ISBN
978-1-4612-8680-6, 978-1-4612-4160-7
DOI
10.1007/978-1-4612-4160-7
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
8 MB (8225818 bytes)
Series
Progress in Theoretical Computer Science
Pages
220\231
Orientation
yes
Scanned
yes
Time added
2013-08-01 04:00:00
CompilersInterpreters; Programming Techniques; ComputationaMath Applications in Computer Science; Application

Description

During the last three decades several different styles of semantics for program­ ming languages have been developed. This book compares two of them: the operational and the denotational approach. On the basis of several exam­ ples we show how to define operational and denotational semantic models for programming languages. Furthermore, we introduce a general technique for comparing various semantic models for a given language. We focus on different degrees of nondeterminism in programming lan­ guages. Nondeterminism arises naturally in concurrent languages. It is also an important concept in specification languages. In the examples discussed, the degree of non determinism ranges from a choice between two alternatives to a choice between a collection of alternatives indexed by a closed interval of the real numbers. The former arises in a language with nondeterministic choices. A real time language with dense choices gives rise to the latter. We also consider the nondeterministic random assignment and parallel composition, both couched in a simple language. Besides non determinism our four example languages contain some form of recursion, a key ingredient of programming languages.

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