True small-step reduction for imperative object oriented languages
Marco Servetto, Lindsay J. Groves · 2013
Traditionally, formal semantic models of Java-like languages use an explicit model of the store which mimics pointers and ram. These low level models hamper understanding of the semantics, and development of proofs about ownerships and other encapsulation properties, since the real (graph) structure of the data is obscured by the encoding. Such models are also inadequate for didactic purposes since they rely on run-time structures that do not exist in the source program --- in order to understand the meaning of an expression in the middle of the execution one is required to visualize the memory structure which is hard to relate to the abstract program state.