Related papers: Concrete Semantics of Programs with Non-Determinis…
The present paper gives a mathematical, in particular, syntax-independent, formulation of intensionality and dynamics of computation in terms of games and strategies. Specifically, we give a game semantics for a higher-order programming…
We present an approach to program reasoning which inserts between a program and its verification conditions an additional layer, the denotation of the program expressed in a declarative form. The program is first translated into its…
The idea of using unfolding as a way of computing a program semantics has been applied successfully to logic programs and has shown itself a powerful tool that provides concrete, implementable results, as its outcome is actually source…
The focus of these lecture notes is on abstract models and basic ideas and results that relate to the operational semantics of programming languages largely conceived. The approach is to start with an abstract description of the computation…
Hardly a week goes by at BUGSENG without having to explain to someone that almost any piece of C text, considered in isolation, means absolutely nothing. The belief that C text has meaning in itself is so common, also among seasoned C…
We introduce the notion of a stochastic probabilistic program and present a reference implementation of a probabilistic programming facility supporting specification of stochastic probabilistic programs and inference in them. Stochastic…
By paying more attention to semantics-based tool generation, programming language semantics can significantly increase its impact. Ultimately, this may lead to ``Language Design Assistants'' incorporating substantial amounts of semantic…
Non deterministic applications arise in many domains, including, stochastic optimization, multi-objectives optimization, stochastic planning, contingent stochastic planning, reinforcement learning, reinforcement learning in partially…
Synchronous languages are now a standard industry tool for critical embedded systems. Designers write high-level specifications by composing streams of values using block diagrams. These languages have been extended with Bayesian reasoning…
An important property of programming language semantics is that they should be compositional. However, unstructured low-level code contains goto-like commands making it hard to define a semantics that is compositional. In this paper, we…
Automatic differentiation plays a prominent role in scientific computing and in modern machine learning, often in the context of powerful programming systems. The relation of the various embodiments of automatic differentiation to the…
Semantic parsing aims to map natural language utterances onto machine interpretable meaning representations, aka programs whose execution against a real-world environment produces a denotation. Weakly-supervised semantic parsers are trained…
We study the semantic foundation of expressive probabilistic programming languages, that support higher-order functions, continuous distributions, and soft constraints (such as Anglican, Church, and Venture). We define a metalanguage (an…
Modern answer set programming solvers such as CLINGO support advanced language constructs that improve the expressivity and conciseness of logic programs. Conditional literals are one such construct. They form "subformulas" that behave as…
Computer programs are often factored into pure components -- simple, total functions from inputs to outputs -- and components that may have side effects -- errors, changes to memory, parallel threads, abortion of the current loop, etc. We…
Probabilistic programming languages rely fundamentally on some notion of sampling, and this is doubly true for probabilistic programming languages which perform Bayesian inference using Monte Carlo techniques. Verifying samplers - proving…
Formal, mathematically rigorous programming language semantics are the essential prerequisite for the design of logics and calculi that permit automated reasoning about concurrent programs. We propose a novel modular semantics designed to…
Semantic properties are domain-specific specification constructs used to augment an existing language with richer semantics. These properties are taken advantage of in system analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance…
This article aims to achieve two goals: to show that probability is not the only way of dealing with uncertainty (and even more, that there are kinds of uncertainty which are for principled reasons not addressable with probabilistic means);…
The focus of the papers presented in this volume is on the interplay between syntax and semantics in case of languages, namely the central question of what a program means and how it does define the intended procedure. This is a crucial…