Object-Oriented Operational Semantics

摘要

Operational semantics is one way of providing meaning to an executable language. On a high level of abstraction, operational semantics means to define an interpreter or an abstract machine for the language. In this article, we review the concept of operational semantics in the scope of meta-model-based language definitions and identify challenges and issues. We provide a clean conceptual approach using an object-oriented runtime environment and state change operations, which relies on an underlying abstract virtual machine. We present the approach using a sample language.