Semantic descriptions library

One of the PLanCompS goals (as a separate work package), involves obtaining, digitising, analysing and indexing existing language specifications, for inclusion in a digital library. The main contributor of this work is Cliff Jones. He worked with the IBM Vienna group on the operational semantics (VDL) description of programming languages in the late 1960s; on a second spell in Vienna he played a major part in the development of their denotational description method (VDM). He is co-editor or single author of all of the early books on VDM.

The current (evolving) contributions to the semantic descriptions library being developed in the PLanCompS project include those aspects of “VDM” relating to language description that were firmed up in the IBM Laboratory in Vienna around a project to build a compiler from the PL/I language to the “FS” machine (that got cancelled).

• One direct output was “published” as the Technical Report on the PL/I description which has been scanned (full citation).
• Another report described the overall method (full citation).
• An older report investigated different implementation techniques for reference to non-local variables (Warning: this uses VDL notation!) (full citation).

Other descriptions (follow the citation links to get to the pdf) using VDM include:

• ALGOL 60 (historically, there is an earlier version in LNCS 61)
• Pascal