Structural Operational Semantics

Abstract

The importance of giving precise semantics to programming and specification<br />languages was recognized since the sixties with the development of the<br />first high-level programming languages (cf. e.g. [30, 206] for some early accounts).<br />The use of operational semantics - i.e. of a semantics that explicitly<br />describes how programs compute in stepwise fashion, and the possible<br />state-transformations they perform - was already advocated by McCarthy<br />in [147], and elaborated upon in references like [142, 143]. Examples of full-blown<br />languages that have been endowed with an operational semantics are<br />Algol 60 [140], PL/I [173], and CSP [178].

SOS Rule Formats for Idempotent Terms and Idempotent Unary Operators

“…Transition system specifications whose rules are in the GSOS format enjoy many desirable properties, and several studies in the literature on the meta-theory of SOS have focused on them-see, for instance, [2,1,4,7,10,15]. In this study we shall also focus on transition system specifications in the GSOS format, which we now proceed to define.…”

“…The rule formats we present in what follows can be extended to arbitrary TSSs at the price of considering the so-called three-valued stable models. See [7] for a survey introduction to three-valued stable models.…”

Exploiting Algebraic Laws to Improve Mechanized Axiomatizations

“…Transition system specifications whose rules are in the GSOS format enjoy many desirable properties, and several studies in the literature on the meta-theory of SOS have focused on them-see, for instance, [2,3,5,12,13,18]. Following [5], in this study we shall also focus on transition system specifications in the GSOS format, which we now proceed to define.…”

Presenting Distributive Laws

“…Examples include the operational models of structural operational semantics [3], denotational models of programming languages [37], finite stream circuits [24], linear…”