Article

Ott: effective tool support for the working semanticist

Authors:

Francesco Zappa Nardelli,

Gilles Peskine,

Rok StrnišaAuthors Info & Claims

ICFP '07: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

Pages 1 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/1291151.1291155

Published: 01 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

It is rare to give a semantic definition of a full-scale programming language, despite the many potential benefits. Partly this is because the available metalanguages for expressing semantics - usually either L^<scp>a</scp>T_EX for informal mathematics, or the formal mathematics of a proof assistant - make it much harder than necessary to work with large definitions.

We present a metalanguage specifically designed for this problem, and a tool, ott, that sanity-checks such definitions and compiles them into proof assistant code for Coq, HOL, Isabelle, and (in progress) Twelf, together with L^<scp>a</scp>T_EX code for production-quality typesetting, and OCaml boilerplate. The main innovations are:(1) metalanguage design to make definitions concise, and easy to read and edit;(2) an expressive but intuitive metalanguage for specifying binding structures; and (3) compilation to proof assistant code.

This has been tested in substantial case studies, including modular specifications of calculi from the TAPL text, a Lightweight Java with Java JSR 277/294 module system proposals, and a large fragment of OCaml (around 306 rules), with machine proofs of various soundness results. Our aim with this work is to enable a phase change: making it feasible to work routinely, without heroic effort, with rigorous semantic definitions of realistic languages.

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Index Terms

Ott: effective tool support for the working semanticist
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Formal language definitions
2. Theory of computation
  1. Formal languages and automata theory

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cover image ACM Conferences

ICFP '07: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

October 2007

346 pages

ISBN:9781595938152

DOI:10.1145/1291151

General Chair:
Ralf Hinze
Universität Bonn, Germany
,
Program Chair:
Norman Ramsey
Harvard University, USA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 42, Issue 9
Proceedings of the ICFP '07 conference
September 2007
331 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1291220
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

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Published: 01 October 2007

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Umatani SHong JPark J(2024)Lightweight DSL for Describing Extensible Transition SystemsProceedings of the 39th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3605098.3636025(1122-1131)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2024
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