Ml. Barja et al., SEMANTICS BASED IMPLEMENTATION OF A DEDUCTIVE OBJECT-ORIENTED DATABASE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE, Journal of programming languages, 2(2), 1994, pp. 93-108
As programming languages become increasingly complex, it is regarded a
s essential to have some means of formally specifying their semantics.
Equally important is it to ensure that an implementation of the langu
age actually conforms to the specification. Thus, it would seem desira
ble to have a close correspondence between the formalism used for spec
ification and the paradigm on which implementation is based. This woul
d provide a framework for guiding the implementor towards a correct im
plementation, and would also facilitate verification. Furthermore, sub
sequent extensions and modifications to the semantics could be conveni
ently incorporated into the implementation. It is proposed that the cl
ose correspondence between structural operational semantics and object
-oriented implementation techniques is particularly suitable for compi
ler construction. The main benefits of this combination are discussed
and its use in the development of an object-oriented programming langu
age for a deductive object-oriented database system is illustrated.