Action Semantics is a practical framework for formal semantic description of programming languages. Since its appearance in 1992, action semantics has been used to describe major languages such as Pascal, SML, ANDF, and Java, and various tools for processing action semantic descriptions have been developed. Recently, the close relationship between action semantics and monadic approaches to denotational semantics has been established.

The workshop was to survey recent achievements, demonstrate tools, and coordinate future work. It was intended primarily for those working with action semantics and related approaches, but participation was open to all; familiarity with the basic ideas of action semantics was assumed.

Abstracts of the accepted presentations are available electronically--just click on the titles in the programme below. Copies were handed out at the workshop. Extended abstracts/full papers for the proceedings have been published in the BRICS Notes Series.

Programme

Venue:

Sunday, 21st March 1999, at NOVOTEL (room Diem 1), Europaboulevard 1, Amsterdam
 

Outline:

08:30	Registration
09:00	Invited talk
10:00	Tools
10:30	Coffee
11:00	Tools, continued
12:30	Lunch
14:00	Recent action-semantic descriptions
15:00	Coffee
15:30	Theoretical foundations
16:30	Concluding discussion
17:30	Close

 

Details:

08:30	Registration
09:00	Invited talk:
	Philipp Kutter, Alfonso Pierantonio (TIK, ETH Zürich, Switzerland):
	Generating an Action Notation Environment from Montages Descriptions
10:00	Tools:
	Stephan Diehl (Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany):
	Bootstrapped Semantics-Directed Compiler Generation
10:30	Coffee
11:00	Tools, continued:
	Hermano Perrelli de Moura, Luis Carlos de Sousa Menezes
	(Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil1):
	The Abaco System - An Algebraic Based Action Compiler
11:30	Kyung-Goo Doh, Hyun-Goo Kang (Hanyang University, Korea):
	Online Partial Evaluation of Actions
12:00	Kent D. Lee (University of Iowa, USA):
	Tuple Sort Inference in Action Semantics
12:30	Lunch
14:00	Recent action-semantic descriptions:
	David A. Watt (University of Glasgow, Scotland):
	The Static and Dynamic Semantics of SML
14:30	Deryck Brown (The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland),
	David A. Watt (University of Glasgow, Scotland):
	JAS: a Java Action Semantics
15:00	Coffee
15:30	Theoretical foundations:
	Peter D. Mosses (SRI International, Menlo Park, USA):
	A Modular SOS for Action Notation
16:00	Søren B. Lassen (University of Cambridge, England):
	Towards a New Action Notation
16:30	Concluding discussion:
	The Future of Action Semantics (with position statements by Peter D. Mosses and David A. Watt)
17:30	Close

Footnotes

 

(1)

The authors from Brazil are unfortunately unable to attend; their presentation will be shown by Deryck Brown.

Sponsors

BRICS (Centre for Basic Research in Computer Science, Denmark)

Computing Science Department, Univ. of Glasgow, Scotland

Organizers

Peter D. Mosses (mosses@csl.sri.com)
Computer Science Laboratory, SRI International, USA

David A. Watt (daw@dcs.gla.ac.uk)
Computing Science Department, Univ. of Glasgow, Scotland

Registration

List of Registered AS'99 Participants