Open AccessExploiting Labels in Structural Operational Semantics
Author(s) -
Peter D. Mosses
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
brics report series
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1601-5355
pISSN - 0909-0878
DOI - 10.7146/brics.v12i8.21874
Subject(s) - semantics (computer science) , programming language , modular design , computer science , operational semantics , set (abstract data type) , expressive power , theoretical computer science , natural language processing
Structural Operational Semantics (SOS) allows transitions to be labelled. This is fully exploited in SOS descriptions of concurrent systems, but usually not at all in conventional descriptions of sequential programming languages. This paper shows how the use of labels can provide significantly simpler and more modular descriptions of programming languages. However, the full power of labels is obtained only when the set of labels is made into a category, as in the recently-proposed MSOS variant of SOS.