Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Objects, Interference, And The Yoneda Embedding, Peter W. O'Hearn, Uday S. Reddy

College of Engineering and Computer Science - Former Departments, Centers, Institutes and Projects

We present a new semantics for Algol-like languages that combines methods from two prior lines of development: [1] the object-based approach of [28,29], where the meaning of an imperative program is described in terms of sequences of observable actions, and [2] the functor-category approach initiated by Reynolds [31], where the varying nature of the run-time stack is explained using functors from a category of store shapes to a category of cpos. The semantics gives an account of both the phenomena of local state and irreversibility of state change. As an indication of the accuracy obtained, we present a full abstraction …