Towards Verification of a Denotational Semantics of Inheritance
P.D. Mosses (TU Delft - Programming Languages)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
Jens Palsberg's first research publication was an OOPSLA '89 paper, coauthored with William Cook. In that much-cited paper, the authors identify self-reference as a central feature of inheritance, and analyze it using fixed points. They then define both an operational and a denotational semantics of inheritance, and prove them equivalent. Their proof exploits an intermediate semantics, obtained by step-indexing the operational semantics – an early use of the so-called 'fuel pattern'.
This paper presents an Agda formulation of the definitions and lemmas from the OOPSLA '89 paper. The Agda proof assistant detected some minor issues when type-checking the definitions; after they had been fixed, Agda successfully checked all the steps in the proofs of the lemmas. The Agda definitions and proofs make the same assumptions as the OOPSLA '89 paper about the existence of recursively defined Scott domains, and about the continuity of the defined functions.
help_outline