Prototyping Action Semantics using functional languages
Paulo Henrique Monteiro Borba, Silvio Romero De Lemos Meira Lemos, André Luis de Medeiros Santos · Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · 1992
Action Semantics is a development of Denotational Semantics used to write formal descriptions of programming language semantics. In this work we describe an extension to a lazy functional language (Lazy ML) to support Action Semantics notation, so that one can (almost) directly translate Action Semantics specifications of programming languages into executable prototypes of their interpreters. Lazy ML's action notation extension proved to be a very useful tool in the process of validation of specifications, as it makes possible to rapidly obtain a prototype interpreter of a language directly from its specification. We describe also how the system was used to produce a prototype interpreter for a functional language.