Research and Evaluation on Formal Semantic Description Techniques
Yingzhou Zhang · Journal of Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications · 2006
The 1990s witnessed the new developments on formal description techniques of program semantics.These techniques are significant for design,reasoning and standardization of programming languages,and for design and optimization of compiler as well.They have been widely used in formal description,analysis,verification and design of security protocols.In sharp contrast to the popularity of formal syntax,formal semantic descriptions have seldom been exploited in practical applications concerning design and implementation of programming languages.In this paper,we firstly review the history of development for semantic description frameworks of programming languages.Then we illustrate and assess the features of main frameworks of current interest.Finally,we give the qualitative comparisons of these frameworks distinctly.We conclude that the abstract state machine(ASM) and modular monadic action semantics(MMAS) approaches are two good candidates for such a framework.