Following a paradigm put forward by Milner and Plotkin, a primary criterion to judge the appropriateness of denotational models for programming and specification languages is that they be in agreement with operational intuition about program behaviour. Of the “good fit” criteria for such models that have been discussed in the literature, the most desirable one is that of full abstraction. Intui...

We present non-standard denotational specifications of the SSA form and of its conversion processes from and to imperative programming languages. Thus, we provide a strong mathematical foundation for this intermediate code representation language used in modern compilers such as GCC or Intel CC. More specifically, we provide (1) a new functional approach to SSA, the Static Single Assignment for...

We consider a call-by-value language, with higher-order functions, records, references to values of arbitrary type, and subtyping. We adapt an intrinsic denotational model for a similar language based on a possible-world semantics, recently given by Levy [14], and relate it to an untyped model by a logical relation. Following the methodology of Reynolds [22], this relation is used to establish ...

We present a categorical theory of ‘well-behaved’ operational semantics which aims at complementing the established theory of domains and denotational semantics to form a coherent whole. It is shown that, if the operational rules of a programming language can be modelled as a natural transformation of a suitable general form, depending on functorial notions of syntax and behaviour, then one get...

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to introduce a new extension of concurrent logic programming languages aiming at handling synchronicity and to present and compare several semantics for it. The extended framework essentially rests on an extension of Horn clauses, including multiple atoms in their heads and a guard construct, as well as a new operator between goals. The semantics discussed ...

In previous papers we have presented operational and denotational accounts of the semantics Demos, a small process-oriented simulation language based upon Simula and Demos. The operational semantics provide precise formal descriptions of synchronisations and event list mechanisms and can be used to guide implementations and reason about the execution of a speciic program. The denotational seman...

We show how parallelizing compilers can be automatically derived from denotational deenitions of programming languages. In our approach, the denotational deenition is expressed using deenite clause grammars (syntax speciication) and Horn Logic or Constraint Logic (semantic speciication). The conditions for executing two or more statements in parallel (e.g., GCD test, Banerjee test, or exact tes...

In this paper we present a truly concurrent semantics for deterministic concurrent recursive processes accessing quantified recyclable resources. The process semantics is built upon the new coherently complete and prime algebraic domain of continued multi-pomsets, which is a quantitative version of the domain of complex resource pomsets. The CSP-like process language that we study contains seve...

The semantics of the elements of SIL-1 descriptions is a combination of an order relation and a data relation on the access points involved. This semantics is described in the SIL-1 Language Report. To determine the order relation on the access points of recursively defined nodes a formal definition of this semantics is needed. In this paper the order part of a denotational semantics for SIL is...

The probabilistic (or quantitative) modal μ-calculus is a fixed-point logic designed for expressing properties of probabilistic labeled transition systems (PLTS). Two semantics have been studied for this logic, both assigning to every process state a value in the interval [0, 1] representing the probability that the property expressed by the formula holds at the state. One semantics is denotati...