article

Ott: effective tool support for the working semanticist

Authors:

Francesco Zappa Nardelli,

Gilles Peskine,

Susmit Sarkar, and

Rok StrnišaAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 42, Issue 9

Pages 1 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/1291220.1291155

Published: 01 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

It is rare to give a semantic definition of a full-scale programming language, despite the many potential benefits. Partly this is because the available metalanguages for expressing semantics - usually either L^<scp>a</scp>T_EX for informal mathematics, or the formal mathematics of a proof assistant - make it much harder than necessary to work with large definitions.

We present a metalanguage specifically designed for this problem, and a tool, ott, that sanity-checks such definitions and compiles them into proof assistant code for Coq, HOL, Isabelle, and (in progress) Twelf, together with L^<scp>a</scp>T_EX code for production-quality typesetting, and OCaml boilerplate. The main innovations are:(1) metalanguage design to make definitions concise, and easy to read and edit;(2) an expressive but intuitive metalanguage for specifying binding structures; and (3) compilation to proof assistant code.

This has been tested in substantial case studies, including modular specifications of calculi from the TAPL text, a Lightweight Java with Java JSR 277/294 module system proposals, and a large fragment of OCaml (around 306 rules), with machine proofs of various soundness results. Our aim with this work is to enable a phase change: making it feasible to work routinely, without heroic effort, with rigorous semantic definitions of realistic languages.

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Index Terms

Ott: effective tool support for the working semanticist
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Formal language definitions
2. Theory of computation
  1. Formal languages and automata theory

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 42, Issue 9

Proceedings of the ICFP '07 conference

September 2007

331 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/1291220

Issue’s Table of Contents

ICFP '07: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
October 2007
346 pages
ISBN:9781595938152
DOI:10.1145/1291151
General Chair:
Ralf Hinze
Universität Bonn, Germany
,
Program Chair:
Norman Ramsey
Harvard University, USA

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

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Published: 01 October 2007

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 42, Issue 9

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Huang XOliveira B(2021)Distributing intersection and union types with splits and duality (functional pearl)Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/34735945:ICFP(1-24)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3473594
Cimini M(2020)On the Effectiveness of Higher-Order Logic Programming in Language-Oriented ProgrammingFunctional and Logic Programming10.1007/978-3-030-59025-3_7(106-123)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2020
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Mourad BCimini M(2020)System Description: Lang-n-Change - A Tool for Transforming LanguagesFunctional and Logic Programming10.1007/978-3-030-59025-3_12(198-214)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59025-3_12
Stark KSchäfer SKaiser JMahboubi AMyreen M(2019)Autosubst 2: reasoning with multi-sorted de Bruijn terms and vector substitutionsProceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Certified Programs and Proofs10.1145/3293880.3294101(166-180)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2019
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