Home
 

Concurrency in a Natural Semantics

Kevin Mitchell

Abstract: Natural Semantics, a form of operational semantics, can be used to give a concise description of the evaluation of many sequential programming languages. However, concurrent languages present a problem for this approach as it is difficult to express the interaction between parallel processes. For such languages an approach such as Plotkin's structural operational semantics is usually preferred. Unfortunately such semantics are frequently verbose and may contain an unnecessary amount of detail about the evaluation. In this paper we show how the relational approach at the heart of Natural Semantics can be extended to handle concurrent languages and explore the relationship between these two semantic approaches in such a setting.

LFCS report ECS-LFCS-94-311, December 1994. (1Mb PostScript file.)

Previous | Index | Next