The Potential Use of Action Semantics in Standards
Peter D. Mosses, David A. Watt · DAIMI Report Series · 1986
Current standards for programming languages generally use informal, rather than formal, semantic descriptions. Possible reasons for this are discussed. Action Semantics, which has been developed from Denotational Semantics and Abstract Semantic Algebras, has some features that may make it more attractive for use in standards than other formal approaches. This paper describes and motivates Action Semantics, and gives some realistic examples of its use.