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 We conclude with an account of an old, previously unpublished, idea: an alternative, perhaps more readable, graphical presentation of systems of rules for operational semantics.

Reproduction of all or part of this work is permitted for educational or research use on condition that this copyright notice is included in any copy. See back inner page for a list of recent BRICS Dissertation Series publications. Copies may be obtained by contacting: BRICS

Abstract not found

We construct a model for FPC, a purely functional, sequential, call-by-value language. The model is built from partial continuous functions, in the style of Plotkin, further constrained to be uniform with respect to a class of logical relations. We prove that the model is fully abstract.

Type free lazy -calculus is enriched with angelic parallelism and demonic nondeterminism. Call-by-name and call-by-value abstractions are considered and the operational semantics is stated in terms of a must convergence predicate. We introduce a type assignment system with intersection and union types and we prove that the induced logical semantics is fully abstract.

. To model at the same time parallel and non-deterministic functional calculi we define a powerdomain functor P such that it is an endofunctor over the category of algebraic lattices. P is locally continuous and we study the initial solution D 1 of the domain equation D = P([D ! D]? ). We derive from the algebras of P the logic of D 1 , that is the axiomatic description of its compact elements. We then define a -calculus and a type assignment system using the logic of D 1 as the related type theory. We prove that the filter model of this calculus, which is isomorphic to D 1 , is fully abstract with respect to the observational pre-order of the -calculus. Keywords: -calculus, Non-determinism, Full Abstraction, Powerdomain Construction, Intersection Type Disciplines. 1. Introduction One of the main issues in the design of programming languages is the achievement of a good compromise between the multiplicity of control structures and data types and the unicity of the mathematica...

category-theoretic accounts of these issues can be found in [Fio93, HJ95]. In type theory. In [CP92], Crole and Pitts introduced a higher-order typed predicate logic for fixed-point computations. This was done by exploiting Moggi's treatment of computations using monads [Mog91], and by introducing the key notion of fixpoint object . Fixpoint objects were partly inspired by Martin-Lof's non-standard "iteration type" [ML83], and give a categorical characterisation of general recursion at higher types similar to the characterisation of primitive recursion at higher types in terms of Lawvere's concept of natural number object [LS86]. A type-theoretic approach to domain theory is that of [Plo93]. There, rather than considering directly possible categorical structure, the idea is to work within a type theory pursuing the analogies: intuitionistic exponential = function space, and linear exponential = strict function space. More precisely, the basic setting is that of second-order intuition...

Abstract not found