The language Esterel has found success in many safety-critical applications, from aircraft landing gear to digital signal processors. Its unique combination of powerful control operations, deterministic concurrency, and real time execution bounds are indispensable to programmer in these kinds of safety-critical domains. However these features lead to an interesting facet of the language, called Constructivity. Constructivity is a non-local property of Esterel programs which makes defining semantics for the language subtle. Existing semantics tend to sacrifice some desirable facet of a language semantics to handle this. Many sacrifice locality, and only work on whole programs. Some sacrifice adequacy, allowing them to describe transformations to programs at the cost of being able to actually run programs. Still more decide to work in a domain other than Esterel, such as circuits, making Constructivity easier to capture, but forcing users of these semantics to reason in a domain which they are not programming in. This dissertation provides the first semantics for Esterel which captures all of the above facets, while still describing Constructivity.

Creator

• Florence, Spencer P

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-sqp3-4928

Subject

• Computer science

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_754043
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15182

Keyword

• Programming Languages
• Semantics
• Calculus
• Esterel

Date created

• 2020-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright