We review the origins of structural operational semantics. The main publication ‘A Structural Approach to Operational Semantics, ’ also known as the ‘Aarhus Notes, ’ appeared in 1981 [G.D. Plotkin, A structural approach to operational semantics, DAIMI FN-19, Computer Science Department, Aarhus University, 1981]. The development of the ideas dates back to the early 1970s, involving many people and building on previous work on programming languages and logic. The former included abstract syntax, the SECD machine, and the abstract interpreting machines of the Vienna school; the latter included the λ-calculus and formal systems. The initial development of structural operational semantics was for simple functional languages, more or less variations of the λ-calculus; after that the ideas were gradually extended to include languages with parallel features, such as Milner’s CCS. This experience set the ground for a more systematic exposition, the subject of an invited course of lectures at Aarhus University; some of these appeared in print as the 1981 Notes. We discuss the content of these lectures and some related considerations such as ‘small state’ versus ‘grand state, ’ structural versus compositional semantics, the influence of the Scott–Strachey approach to denotational semantics, the treatment of recursion and jumps, and static semantics. We next discuss relations with other work and some immediate further development. We conclude with an account of an old, previously unpublished, idea: an alternative, perhaps more readable, graphical presentation of systems of rules for operational semantics.

In these notes, we give an overview of the join calculus, its semantics, and its equational theory. The join calculus is a language that models distributed and mobile programming. It is characterized by an explicit notion of locality, a strict adherence to local synchronization, and a direct embedding of the ML programming language. The join calculus is used as the basis for several distributed languages and implementations, such as JoCaml and functional nets.

The nominal approach to abstract syntax deals with the issues of bound names and α-equivalence by considering constructions and properties that are invariant with respect to permuting names. The use of permutations gives rise to an attractively simple formalisation of common, but often technically incorrect uses of structural recursion and induction for abstract syntax modulo α-equivalence. At the heart of this approach is the notion of finitely supported mathematical objects. This paper explains the idea in as concrete a way as possible and gives a new derivation within higher-order logic of principles of α-structural recursion and induction for α-equivalence classes from the ordinary versions of these principles for abstract syntax trees.

Existential types are the standard formalisation of abstract types. While this formulation is sufficient in entirely statically typed languages, it proves to be too weak for languages enriched with forms of dynamic typing: in the presence of operations performing type analysis, the abstraction barrier erected by the static typing rules for existential types is no longer impassable, because parametricity is violated. We present a light-weight calculus for polymorphic languages with abstract types that addresses this shortcoming. It features a variation of existential types that retains most of the simplicity of standard existentials. It relies on modified scoping rules and explicit coercions between the quantified variable and its witness type.

We define a language CQP (Communicating Quantum Processes) for modelling systems which combine quantum and classical communication and computation. CQP combines the communication primitives of the picalculus with primitives for measurement and transformation of quantum state; in particular, quantum bits (qubits) can be transmitted from process to process along communication channels. CQP has a static type system which classifies channels, distinguishes between quantum and classical data, and controls the use of quantum state. We formally define the syntax, operational semantics and type system of CQP, prove that the semantics preserves typing, and prove that typing guarantees that each qubit is owned by a unique process within a system. We illustrate CQP by defining models of several quantum communication systems, and outline our plans for using CQP as the foundation for formal analysis and verification of combined quantum and classical systems. 1

We propose a new type system for information flow analysis for the

This document consists of a slightly revised and corrected version of a dissertation

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Interpretation. An alternative way to analyze the behavior of a concurrent program would be to use abstract interpretation [4, 5]. Actually, from a very general viewpoint, our type-based analysis of locks can be seen as a kind of abstract interpretation. We can read a type judgment # P as "# is an abstraction of a concrete process P ." (The relation "#" corresponds to a pair of abstraction /concretization functions.) Indeed, we can regard a type environment as an abstract process: we have defined reductions of type environments in Section 3.7.