Global State Considered Unnecessary: Introduction to Object-Based Semantics
Uday S. Reddy · Birkhäuser Boston eBooks · 1997
Semantics of imperative programming languages is traditionally described in terms of functions on global states. We propose here a novel approach based on a notion of objects and characterize them in terms of their observable behavior. States are regarded as part of the internal structure of objects and play no role in the observable behavior. It is shown that this leads to considerable accuracy in the semantic modelling of locality and single-threadedness properties of objects. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.