Semantic Correctness for a Parallel Object-Oriented Language

Different semantic models are studied for a language called POOL: parallel object-oriented language. It is a simplified version of POOL-T, a language that is actually used to write programs for a parallel machine. The most important aspect of this language is that it describes a system as a collection of communicating objects that all have internal activities which are executed in parallel. For POOL, operational and denotational semantics have been developed previously. The former aims at the intuitive operational meaning of the language, whereas the main characteristic of the latter is compositionality. In this paper, the author relates both models, which are quite different, and proves the semantic correctness of the denotational semantics with respect to the operational semantics. These semantic investigations take place in the mathematical framework of complete metric spaces. For the operational semantics a simple space of functions from states to compact sets of streams (which are sequences of states...