Transforming Big-Step to Small-Step Semantics Using Interpreter Specialisation
Authors: 
John P. Gallagher, Manuel Hermenegildo, José Morales, Pedro Lopez-GarciaAuthors Info & Claims
John P. Gallagher, Manuel Hermenegildo, José Morales, Pedro Lopez-GarciaAuthors Info & ClaimsPages 28 - 38
Abstract
Natural semantics (big-step) and structural operational semantics (small-step) each have advantages, so it can be useful to produce both semantic forms for a language. Previous work has shown that big-step semantics can be transformed to small-step semantics. This is also the goal of our work, but our main contribution is to show that this can be done by specialisation of an interpreter that imposes a small-step execution on big-step transition rules. This is arguably more direct, transparent and flexible than previous methods. The paper contains two examples and further examples are available in an online repository.
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Oct 2023
214 pages
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.
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Springer-Verlag
Berlin, Heidelberg
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Published: 23 October 2023
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