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Slot games: a quantitative model of computation

Published: 12 January 2005 Publication History

Abstract

We present a games-based denotational semantics for a quantitative analysis of programming languages. We define a Hyland-Ong-style games framework called slot games, which consists of HO games augmented with a new action called token. We develop a slot-game model for the language Idealised Concurrent Algol by instrumenting the strategies in its HO game model with token actions. We show that the slot-game model is a denotational semantics induced by a notion of observation formalised in the operational theory of improvement of Sands, and we give a full abstraction result. A quantitative analysis of programs has many potential applications, from compiler optimisations to resource-constrained execution and static performance profiling. We illustrate several such applications with putative examples that would be nevertheless difficult, if not impossible, to handle using known operational techniques.

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cover image ACM Conferences
POPL '05: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
January 2005
402 pages
ISBN:158113830X
DOI:10.1145/1040305
  • General Chair:
  • Jens Palsberg,
  • Program Chair:
  • Martín Abadi
  • cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
    ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 40, Issue 1
    Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
    January 2005
    391 pages
    ISSN:0362-1340
    EISSN:1558-1160
    DOI:10.1145/1047659
    Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 12 January 2005

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Author Tags

  1. algol
  2. game semantics
  3. quantitative analysis

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