Modern software is no more developed in a single programming language. Instead, programmers tend to exploit cross-language interoperability mechanisms to combine code stemming from different languages, and thus yielding fully-fledged multi-language programs. Whilst this approach enables developers to benefit from the strengths of each single-language, on the other hand it complicates the semantics of such programs. Indeed, the resulting multi-language does not meet any of the semantics of the combined languages. In this paper, we broaden the boundary functions-based approach à la Matthews and Findler to propose an algebraic framework that provides a constructive mathematical notion of multi-language able to determine its semantics. The aim of this work is to overcome the lack of a formal method (resp., model) to design (resp., represent) a multi-language, regardless of the inherent nature of the underlying languages. We show that our construction ensures the uniqueness of the semantic function (i.e., the multi-language semantics induced by the combined languages) by proving the initiality of the term model (i.e., the abstract syntax of the multi-language) in its category.
CITATION STYLE
Buro, S., & Mastroeni, I. (2019). On the Multi-Language Construction. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 11423 LNCS, pp. 293–321). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17184-1_11
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