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From: cliff@cs.man.ac.uk (Cliff Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.theory
Subject: Re: Actual use of formal semantics in languages
Message-ID: <1539@m1.cs.man.ac.uk>
Date: 31 Jul 90 16:29:45 GMT
References: <9864@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Sender: news@cs.man.ac.uk
Reply-To: cliff@cs.man.ac.uk (Cliff Jones)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester UK
Lines: 37


Hi there!

There are several VDM definitions of standard languages. The Bjorner/Jones
book (see below) has VDM descriptions of Pascal and ALGOL 60; that has
refernces to the Vienna work which sparked off VDM: a description of
ECMA/ANSI PL/I.

Springer-Verlag's LNCS 98 reports on early attempts by the DDC to
describe Ada. A version of this was then used in their development of
an Ada compiler (the first European compiler to be approved via the
DoD test cases I believe). There was subsequent ESPRIT-funded work to
develop a full Ada semantics.

The current Modula-2 standard is being developed in VDM.

cliff jones

========================================


@book{BjornerJones82,
	author =	"D. Bj{\o}rner and C.B. Jones",
	year =		"1982",
	publisher =	"Prentice Hall International",
	title =		"Formal Specification and Software Development",
	note = 		"501 pages"
}

@BOOK{		Bjorner80f,
  EDITOR	= "D. Bj{\o}rner and O.Oest",
  TITLE		= "Towards a Formal Description of {Ada}",
  PUBLISHER	= S-V,
  YEAR		= "1980",
  VOLUME        = "98",
  SERIES	= LNCS
}