Professor Dr. Uday Reddy

"An Automata-theoretic Model of Programming Languages"

In this talk, I present a new model of class-based Algol-like programming languages inspired by automata-theoretic concepts. The model may be seen as a variant of the "object-based" model previously developed in 1993, where objects are described by their observable behaviour in terms of events, and "state-based" models studied by Reynolds, Oles, Tennent and O'Hearn where objects are not explicitly represented. The idea is to view objects as automata which are described from the outside through their observable behaviour while, internally, their operations are represented as state transformations. This allows us to to combine both the state-based and event-based views of objects. I illustrate the efficacy of the model by proving several test equivalences and discuss its connections to the previous models.