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International Workshop on Abstract State Machines

ASM 2000: Abstract State Machines - Theory and Applications pp 177–202Cite as

Verifying Compilers and ASMs or ASMs for Uniform Description of Multistep Transformations

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1912))

Abstract

A verifying compiler ensures that the compiled code is always correct but the compiler may also terminate with an error mesage and then fails to generate code. We argue that with respect to compiler correctness this is the best possible result which can be achieved in practice. Such a compiler may even include unverified code provided the results of such code can be proven correct independently from how they are generated.We then show how abstract state machines (ASMs) can be used to uniformly describe the dynamic semantics of the programs being compiled across the various intermediate transformation steps occurring within a compiler. Besides being a convenient tool for describing dynamic semantics the fact that we do not have to switch between difaerent descriptional methods is found to be extremely useful.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universitäat Karlsruhe Fakultät für Informatik, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Gerhard Goos & Wolf Zimmermann

Authors
  1. Gerhard Goos
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  2. Wolf Zimmermann
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, USA

    Yuri Gurevich

  2. ETH Zürich, Institute TIK Gloriastr., 35, 8092, Zürich, Switzerland

    Philipp W. Kutter

  3. EPFL Lausanne, DI IN-Ecublens, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Martin Odersky

  4. ETH Zürich, Institute TIK Gloriastr., 35, 8092, Zürich, Switzerland

    Lothar Thiele

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Goos, G., Zimmermann, W. (2000). Verifying Compilers and ASMs or ASMs for Uniform Description of Multistep Transformations. In: Gurevich, Y., Kutter, P.W., Odersky, M., Thiele, L. (eds) Abstract State Machines - Theory and Applications. ASM 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1912. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44518-8_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44518-8_11

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67959-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44518-0

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