Abstract
This paper is about the recently-developed framework of action semantics. The pragmatic qualities of action semantic descriptions are particularly good, which encourages their use in industrial-scale applications where semantic descriptions are needed, e.g., compiler development.
The paper has two main aims: to demonstrate the remarkable extensibility of action semantic descriptions, and to illustrate the action semantics treatment of concurrency. These aims are achieved simultaneously, by first giving the description of a sequential (ML-like) programming language fragment, and then extending the described language with some concurrency primitives (taken from CML). The action semantic description of the sequential part of the language does not change at all when the concurrency primitives are added, it merely gets augmented by the description of the new features!
This work was partly supported by the Danish Science Research Council project DART (5.21.08.03).
This work was partly supported by CNPq, Brazil.
Funded by the Danish National Research Foundation
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Gul Agha. Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems. MIT Press, 1986.
Dave Berry, Robin Milner, and David N. Turner. A semantics for ML concurrency primitives. In Proc. 17th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, pages 119–129. ACM, 1992.
Pietro Cenciarelli and Eugenic Moggi. A syntactic approach to modularity in denotational semantics. Draft, May 1993.
Bo Stig Hansen and Jens Ulrik Toft. The formal specification of ANDF, an application of action semantics. In Peter D. Mosses, editor, Proc. First Intl. Workshop on Action Semantics (Edinburgh, April 1994), number NS-94-1 in BRICS Notes Series, pages 34–42. BRICS, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Aarhus, Denmark, 1994.
Peter D. Mosses. Unified algebras and institutions. In LICS'89, Proc. 4th Ann. Symp. on Logic in Computer Science, pages 304–312. IEEE, 1989.
Peter D. Mosses. Unified algebras and modules. In POPL'89, Proc. 16th Ann. ACM Symp. on Principles of Programming Languages, pages 329–343. ACM, 1989.
Peter D. Mosses. Denotational semantics. In J. van Leeuwen, A. Meyer, M. Nivat, M. Paterson, and D. Perrin, editors, Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, volume B, chapter 11. Elsevier Science Publishers, Amsterdam; and MIT Press, 1990.
Peter D. Mosses. Action Semantics, volume 26 of Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science. Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Robin Milner, Mads Tofte, and Robert Harper. The Definition of Standard ML. MIT Press, 1990.
Jens P. Nielsen and Jens Ulrik Toft. Formal specification of ANDF, existing subset. Technical Report 202104/RPT/19, issue 2, DDC International A/S, Lundtoftevej 1C, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark, 1994.
John H. Reppy. CML: A higher-order concurrent language. In Proc. 57(7-PLAN'91, Conf. on Prog. Lang. Design and Impl., pages 293–305. ACM, 1991.
John H. Reppy. An operational semantics of first-class synchronous operations. Technical Report TR 91-1232, Computer Science Dept., Cornell Univ., 1991.
David A. Schmidt. Denotational Semantics: A Methodology for Language Development. Allyn & Bacon, 1986.
Jens Ulrik Toft. Feasibility of using RSL as the specification language for the ANDF formal specification. Technical Report 202104/RPT/12, issue 2, DDC International A/S, Lundtoftevej 1C, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark, 1993.
David A. Watt. Programming Language Syntax and Semantics. Prentice-Hall, 1991.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mosses, P.D., Musicante, M. (1994). An action semantics for ML concurrency primitives. In: Naftalin, M., Denvir, T., Bertran, M. (eds) FME '94: Industrial Benefit of Formal Methods. FME 1994. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 873. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-58555-9_110
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-58555-9_110
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-58555-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49031-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive