APPSEM

Esprit Working Group 26142 - Applied Semantics

APPSEM is a working group in the ESPRIT program of the European Union which officially started on 1 April 1998 and ended on 31 March 2002.

The aim of APPSEM

Programming languages are the material from which every software product is built. They therefore have a huge economic impact: better programming languages will lead to higher programming productivity, reduced maintenance, and increased software reuse. Europe has great strength in programming language research, with many world leaders both in semantic theory and in implementation. The purpose of this project is to bring these reseachers together in a Working Group, with the specific aim of improving the communication between theoreticians and practitioners. In this way we wish to focus theoreticians' attention on important practical problems as well as to speed up the application of new theoretical ideas in practice.

Specific Objectives

The proposal is structured into nine interdisciplinary themes, which were identified as particularly promising for profitable interaction between semantic theory and practice. These themes relate to the following general areas:

description of existing programming language features (for example object oriented);
design of new programming language features;
implementation and analysis of programming languages;
transformation and generation of programs;
verification of programs.

The themes are

State of the Art

Industrial Relevance

Past meetings

Summer and spring school:

International Summer School on Applied Semantics, Caminha, Portugal, 9-15 September 2000. The lecture notes from this summer school will appear as Springer LNCS 2395.
Spring School on Semantics of Programming Langugues, Agay-Var, France, 24-29 March, 2002.

Workshops:

Workshop on Normalization by Evaluation, Göteborg, 8-9 May 1998. The preliminary proceedings appear as BRICS Note NS-98-1.
Workshop on Logical Abstract Machines (WoLAM'98), Saarbrucken, 17-24 August 1998 (proceedings).
First APPSEM Workshop, Pisa, 14-16 September 1998 (proceedings).
Workshop on Dependent Types in Programming, Göteborg 27-28 March 1999 (proceedings).
Workshop on Realizability Semantics, Trento, 30 June - 1 July 1999 (proceedings).
Logical Abstract Machines (WoLAM'99), Birmingham 14-16 July 1999 (proceedings).
Second APPSEM Workshop, Edinburgh 7-9 September 1999 (proceedings).
HOOTS'99, Paris 30 September - 1 October 1999 (proceedings).
Workshop on Subtyping and Dependent Types in Programming, Ponte de Lima, Portugal, 6 July 2000 (proceedings).
Third APPSEM Workshop, Darmstadt, 19-22 March 2001.
PFM: Proofs For Mobility, Genova, 2 - 6 April, 2001.
Second Symposium on Programs as Data Objects (PADO II), Aarhus, 21-23 May, 2001.
Mechanized Reasoning about Languages with Variable Binding (MERLIN 2001), Siena, Italy, June 18-19, 2001.
Dependent Type Theory meets Practical Programming, Dagstuhl Seminar 01341, 19-24 August 2001.
Semantics, Applications and Implementation of Program Generation (SAIG'01), Firenze, 6 September 2001.
The 8th Biennial Workshop on Data Bases and Programming Languages (DBPL '01) Marino, Rome, 8-10 September 2001.