Archive - Central European Conference on Information and Intelligent Systems, CECIIS - 2015

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A new approach to operational semantics by categories
William Steingartner, Valerie Novitzká

Last modified: 2015-08-05

Abstract


Structural operational semantics is one of the most popular semantic methods in the community of software engineers. It describes program behavior in the form of change of states caused by execution of elementary steps. This feature predestinates Structural operational semantics for implementation of programming languages and also for verification purposes. In our paper we present a new approach to Structural operational semantics: behavior of programs, i.e. state changes we model in category of states. Category morphisms express elementary execution steps and program execution is an oriented path in category, i.e. composition of morphisms. Our approach is able to accentuate dynamics of Structural operational semantics, it is intuitively typed. That's why such model is suitable not only as a model for Structural operational semantics but also for educating young software engineers.

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