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Book review

Author(s) Droste, Manfred (ed.)
Gurevich, Yuri (ed.)
Title Semantics of Programming Languages and Model Theory
Publisher Gordon and Breach Science Publishers
Year of publication 1993
   
Reviewed by Doina TATAR

This volume contains papers presented at the "Conference on Semantics of Programming Languages and Model Theory" which was held at the International Conference and Research Center for Computer Science, Schlos Dagstuhl, during June 23-29, l991. This conference represented a wide range of interests as was reflected in the list of papers: 1. "A formal specification for PARLOG" by E. Borger and E. Riccobene, (the authors provide a complet semantics for PARLOG, with a explicit formalization of AND-parallelism and OR-parallelism), 2. "The meaning of specification II: Set-theoretic specifications" (the main theorem states a uniform translation into initial algebric specification), 3. "Petri nets and automata with concurrency relations: An adjunction" by M. Droste, R.M. Shortt (the cathegory of automata with a collection of binary relations is introduced), 4. "Concurrent automata, prime event structures and universal domains" by P. Boldi, F. Cardone, N. Sabadini (the relationship between computation spaces of c.automata is studied), 5. "Syntesis of nondeterministic asynchronous automata" by G. Pighizzini (a new characterization of the class of trace languages is introduced), 6. "A cartesian closed cathegory of parallel algorithms between Scott-domains" by S. Brookes, S. Geva (a category framework is presented), 7. "Observable modules and power domain constructions" by R. Heckmann, 8. "The Smyth-completion of a quasi-uniform space" by P. Sunderhauf, 9. "What is a state of a system?" by U. Abraham, lO. "Current trends in the semantics of data flow" by J. Kok (the semantic models for dataflow is presented), 11. "Computing the canonical representation of a finite lattice" by D. Bleichenbacher, J. Schmid 12. "A theory of unary pairfunction" by B. Wald, 13. "A lattice interpretation of database dependencies" by A. Day, 14. "Semantics in an extended entity-relationship model" by B. Tgalheim.

This volume reflects, as the series intended, the interplay between algebra, logic and semantics of programming languages.

A very rich index ends this very actual book.