An Event-Based Structural Operational Semantics of Multi-Threaded Java

A structural operational semantics of a signiicant sublan-guage of Java is presented, including the running and stopping of threads, thread interaction via shared memory, synchronization by monitoring and notiication, and sequential control mechanisms such as exception handling and return statements. The operational semantics is paramet-ric in the notion of \event space" 6], which formalizes the rules that threads and memory must obey in their interaction. Diierent computational models are obtained by modifying the well-formedness conditions on event spaces while leaving the operational rules untouched. In particular , we implement the prescient stores described in 10, x17.8] which allow certain intermediate code optimizations, and prove that such stores do not aaect the semantics of properly synchronized programs.