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A Metric Approach to Control Flow Semantics
Author(s) -
BAKKER J.W.,
VINK E.P.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
annals of the new york academy of sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.712
H-Index - 248
eISSN - 1749-6632
pISSN - 0077-8923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1996.tb49156.x
Subject(s) - denotational semantics , metric (unit) , semantics (computer science) , computer science , programming language , exposition (narrative) , control flow , fixed point theorem , operational semantics , theoretical computer science , banach fixed point theorem , algebra over a field , mathematics , discrete mathematics , pure mathematics , art , operations management , literature , economics
The authors' monograph “Control Flow Semantics” (MIT Press 1996) gives an extensive exposition of comparative programming language semantics using techniques from metric topology. In the book Banach's fixed‐point theorem for complete metric spaces plays a prominent role in the construction and comparison of semantical models. Here we present the basic idea of exploiting Banach's theorem. The approach is illustrated with the definition of an operational and a denotational model for an abstract programming language with parallelism. Note: The work reported here is not novel, but intended to provide an introduction of the metric approach to programming language semantics for a nonspecialist audience.