Control Flow Semantics

Control Flow Semantics presents a unified, formal treatment of the semantics of awide spectrum of control flow notions as found in sequential, concurrent, logic, object-oriented,and functional programming languages. Whereas in more traditional approaches one focuses oninput/output behavior, in this work equal attention is devoted to finite and infinite computations,the latter motivated by the growing importance of reactive systems.Knowledge of the comparativesemantics of control structures is critical for the designers of programming languages, and it isdifficult to choose from today's bewildering variety of control flow concepts (the ways in which aprogram specifies the successive steps to be taken during execution). Encyclopedic in scope, ControlFlow Semantics provides comprehensive coverage of these concepts, developing operational anddenotational models for control flow in 27 languages. In all cases, precise statements are givenrelating these models.A rich body of semantic definitional techniques is presented, including(labeled) transition systems, higher-order definitions, resumptions and continuations, linear orsequence-based models, and models specified by domain equations. Moreover, both symbol-based orschematic languages -- prevalent in the study of concurrency -- and state-based or interpretedlanguages are considered. The book is founded on a unifying mathematical basis of metric structures,allowing the full modeling of infinite behavior, as well as the exploitation of some classicalresults, such as Banach's fixed point theorem. Perspectives on further topics, such as fullabstractness, noninterleaving semantics for parallelism, and second-order programming are alsoincluded.Foundations of Computing series

J. W. de Bakker is Professor at the Centrum voor Wiskinde en Informatica in Amsterdam.

Erik de Vink is Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology.