Related papers: A Comparison of Big-step Semantics Definition Styl…

As is evident in the programming language literature, many practitioners favor specifying dynamic program behavior using big-step over small-step semantics. Unlike small-step semantics, which must dwell on every intermediate program state,…

Our research is part of a wider project that aims to investigate and reason about the correctness of scheme-based source code transformations of Erlang programs. In order to formally reason about the definition of a programming language and…

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…

Many universities have courses and projects revolving around compiler or interpreter implementation as part of their degree programmes in computer science. In such teaching activities, tool support can be highly beneficial. While there are…

Verified compilers aim to guarantee that compilation preserves the observable behavior of source programs. While small-step semantics are widely used in such compilers, they are not always the most convenient framework for structural…

Small-step and big-step operational semantics are two fundamental styles of structural operational semantics (SOS), extensively used in practice. The former one is more fine-grained and is usually regarded as primitive, as it only defines a…

In order to reason about the behaviour of programs described in a programming language, a mathematically rigorous definition of that language is needed. In this paper, we present a machine-checked formalisation of concurrent Core Erlang (a…

We present a small-step, frame stack style, semantics for sequential Core Erlang, a dynamically typed, impure functional programming language. The semantics and the properties that we prove are machine-checked with the Coq proof assistant.…

It is well-known that big-step semantics is not able to distinguish stuck and non-terminating computations. This is a strong limitation as it makes very difficult to reason about properties involving infinite computations, such as type…

Formal semantics offers a complete and rigorous definition of a language. It is important to define different semantic models for a language and different models serve different purposes. Building equivalence between different semantic…

Operational semantics has established itself as a flexible but rigorous means to describe the meaning of programming languages. Oftentimes, it is felt necessary to keep a semantics small, for example to facilitate its use for model checking…

Using a call-by-value functional language as an example, this article illustrates the use of coinductive definitions and proofs in big-step operational semantics, enabling it to describe diverging evaluations in addition to terminating…

A reliable technique for deductive program verification should be proven sound with respect to the semantics of the programming language. For each different language, the construction of a separate soundness proof is often a laborious…

We present a technique for deriving semantic program analyses from a natural semantics specification of the programming language. The technique is based on a particular kind of semantics called pretty-big-step semantics. We present a…

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…

Python is a popular high-level general-purpose programming language also heavily used by the scientific community. It supports a variety of different programming paradigms and is preferred by many for its ease of use. With the vision of…

Structural operational semantic specifications come in different styles: small-step and big-step. A problem with the big-step style is that specifying divergence and abrupt termination gives rise to annoying duplication. We present a novel…

We present a novel approach to construction of a formal semantics for a programming language. Our approach, using a parametric denotational semantics, allows the semantics to be easily extended to support new language features, and…

Types in logic programming have focused on conservative approximations of program semantics by regular types, on one hand, and on type systems based on a prescriptive semantics defined for typed programs, on the other. In this paper, we…

Formal languages let us define the textual representation of data with precision. Formal grammars, typically in the form of BNF-like productions, describe the language syntax, which is then annotated for syntax-directed translation and…