SEMANTICS BASED IMPLEMENTATION OF A DEDUCTIVE OBJECT-ORIENTED DATABASE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

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.