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      Teaching Semantics of Programming Languages with Modular SOS

      Published
      proceedings-article
      Teaching Formal Methods: Practice and Experience (TFM)
      Teaching Formal Methods: Practice and Experience
      15 December 2006
      Teaching, Formal Semantics, Programming Languages, Modular SOS
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            Abstract

            Most undergraduate courses on formal semantics are based on conventional Structural Operational Semantics (SOS) and/or Denotational Semantics. Typically, they give semantic descriptions of a series of small programming languages, starting from a very simple one, and subsequently extending it with various new features. For each extension, however, it is usually necessary to revisit the description of the constructs of the initial language, and reformulate it to take account of the new features – although the required reformulation is often so routine that it may be left as an exercise. In contrast, a course based on Modular SOS gives an independent description of each language construct, and no reformulation at all is needed when adding new features. Such a course has been given for 3rd-year undergraduates at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, 2001–2004. A further novelty of the course was to use substantial fragments of a real programming language (Standard ML) for illustration and exercises. Moreover, tool support for Modular SOS enabled the students to add their own descriptions of new constructs to a given language description, and to check empirically whether the resulting semantics of programs in the extended language was as intended.

            Content

            Author and article information

            Contributors
            Conference
            December 2006
            December 2006
            : 1-6
            Affiliations
            [0001]Department of Computer Science, Swansea University

            Singleton Park, Swansea, SA2 8PP, UK

            www.cs.swan.ac.uk/~cspdm
            Article
            10.14236/ewic/TFM2006.12
            4e915ce6-28e6-4840-8d3c-4b0332721fbf
            © Peter D. Mosses. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. Teaching Formal Methods: Practice and Experience, BCS London Office, UK

            This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

            Teaching Formal Methods: Practice and Experience
            TFM
            BCS London Office, UK
            15 December 2006
            Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)
            Teaching Formal Methods: Practice and Experience
            History
            Product

            1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

            Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/TFM2006.12
            Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/
            Categories
            Electronic Workshops in Computing

            Applied computer science,Computer science,Security & Cryptology,Graphics & Multimedia design,General computer science,Human-computer-interaction
            Teaching,Formal Semantics,Programming Languages,Modular SOS

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