Abstract
We give semantics for imperative while-programs by assigning a set of single-assignments and a value function to each program. The semantics is shown to be consistent with Dijkstra's predicate transformers. Every program execution is seen to generate a set of events with data dependencies. The events are the single-assignments and the data dependencies between them are given by common input/output variables. Program parts that always generate isomorphic sets can sometimes be effectively parallelized, using known methods for mapping sets of events with static dependencies to a space-time. Thus, the semantics can be helpful for finding techniques for compilation of while-programs to fine-grain parallel and pipelined target architectures. It also shows the relationship between imperative languages and single-assignment languages.
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Lisper, B. (1989). Single-assignment semantics for imperative programs. In: Odijk, E., Rem, M., Syre, JC. (eds) PARLE '89 Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe. PARLE 1989. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 366. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-51285-3_49
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-51285-3_49
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