Category theory provides an excellent foundation for studying structured specifications and their composition. For example, theories can be structured together in a diagram, and their composition can be obtained as a colimit. There is, however, a growing awareness, both in theory and in specification practice, that structured theories should not be viewed just as the "scaffolding" used to build unstructured theories: they should become first-class citizens in the specification process. Given a logic formalized as an institution I, we therefore ask whether there is a good definition of the category of I-structured theories, and whether they can be naturally regarded as the ordinary theories of an appropriate institution S(I) generalizing the original institution I. We answer both question in the affirmative, and study good properties of the institution I inherited by S(I). We show that, under natural conditions, a number of important properties are indeed inherited, including cocompleteness of the category of theories, liberality, and extension of the basic framework by freeness constraints. The results presented here have been used as a foundation for the module algebra of the Maude language, and seem promising as a semantic basis for a generic module algebra that could be both specified and executed within the logical framework of rewriting logic. 1

Summary. A semantics for the Clear specification language is given. The language of set theory is employed to present constructions corresponding to Clear's specification-combining operations, which are then used as the basis for a denotational semantics. This is in contrast to Burstall and Goguen's 1980 semantics which described the meanings of these operations

this paper, we will describe the main techniques for the semantic definition of some of the most used structuring and modular constructs. Our main aim will be to study the generic, "institutionindependent ", version of each construct. However, in order to provide intuition, in most cases, we will first study these constructions in connection to equational logic.

In this paper we continue previous work from Sannella, Sokolowski and Tarlecki on parameterization in specification languages. Within the loose approach, we define specification and model level semantics for two kinds of parameterizations (parameterized specifications and specifications of parameterized data types) and describe, in a compositional manner, parameter passing at the two levels. Moreover, the specification and the model level semantics of parameter passing are shown to be compatible. We also show that the results obtained do not only apply to the loose approach but can also be directly applicable to the initial framework, and in general to any other kind of monomorphic framework (i.e. a framework where all specifications are monomorphic). In particular, the results obtained generalize and extend previous results for the initial approach. Finally, for obtaining all our results, new categorical constructions of multiple pushouts, amalgamations and extensions, gen...

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Data Types and Algebraic Semantics The history of programming languages, and to a large extent of software engineering as a whole, can be seen as a succession of ever more powerful abstraction mechanisms. The first stored program computers were programmed in binary, which soon gave way to assembly languages that allowed symbolic codes for operations and addresses. fortran began the spread of "high level" programming languages, though at the time it was strongly opposed by many assembly programmers; important features that developed later include blocks, recursive procedures, flexible types, classes, inheritance, modules, and genericity. Without going into the philosophical problems raised by abstraction (which in view of the discussion of realism in Section 4 may be considerable), it seems clear that the mathematics used to describe programming concepts should in general get more abstract as the programming concepts get more abstract. Nevertheless, there has been great resistance to u...

Data Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 4.5.4 Special Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 4.6 Semantics of Programming Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 4.6.1 Semantics of Ada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 4.6.2 Action Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 4.7 Specification Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 4.7.1 Early Algebraic Specification Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 4.7.2 Recent Algebraic Specification Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 4.7.3 The Common Framework Initiative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 5 Methodology 57 5.1 Development Phases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 5.1.1 Applica...