15 research outputs found
Fifty years of Hoare's Logic
We present a history of Hoare's logic.Comment: 79 pages. To appear in Formal Aspects of Computin
The action semantics of object-oriented languages
Action Semantics is a framework for defining the semantics of languages. It is
intended to be accessible to a wider audience of Computer Scientists than traditional
semantics frameworks (such as Denotational Semantics). There has been little work
carried out to date on the techniques required to define object-oriented languages with
Action Semantics.
The work presented in this thesis examines four potential approaches to defining the
Action Semantics of object-oriented languages. In order to illustrate the four
approaches a simple language EIL (Example Inheritance Language) is given, and
described using these four approaches. The language Smalltalk-80 has been selected
for a case study of a practical application of one of the techniques described above.
It is important to be able to relate Action Semantics definitions of object-oriented
languages to similar definitions given in other frameworks. It is described how this
can be achieved. An example is given for the Action Semantics and Denotational
Semantics of Smalltalk.
This thesis concludes that it is feasible to produce Action Semantics definitions of
object-oriented languages