Abstract:
One of the most widespread programming paradigms today is that of object-oriented programming. With the growing popularity of the language C++ and the advent of Java as the language of choice for the World Wide Web, object-oriented programs have taken centre stage. Consequently, the past decade has seen a flurry of interest within the programming language research community for providing a firm semantic basis for object-oriented constructs.
Recently, there has been growing interest in studying the
behavioural properties of object-oriented programs using concepts and ideas
from the world of concurrent process calculi, in particular calculi with some
notion of mobility. Not only do such calculi, as the well-known
-calculus by Milner and others, have features like references and
scoping in common with object-oriented languages; they also provide one with
a rich vocabulary of reasoning techniques firmly grounded in structural
operational semantics.
The process calculus view has therefore proven to be advantageous in many ways for semantics and verification issues. On the one hand, the use of encodings of object-oriented languages into existing typed mobile process calculi enables formal reasoning about the correctness of programs; on the other hand, using standard techniques from concurrency theory in the setting of calculi for objects may help in reasoning about objects, e.g. by finding appropriate and mathematically tractable notions of behavioural equivalences. Encodings may also help clarify the overlap and differences of objects and processes, and suggest how to integrate them best in languages with both.
The aim of the one-day SOAP workshop, which is a satellite workshop of ICALP 98, has been to bring together researchers working mainly in this area, but in related fields as well, where other process models or calculi are used as a basis for the semantics of objects.
Among the submitted abstracts, six were recommended by the programme committee (Martín Abadi, Hans Hüttel, Josva Kleist, and Uwe Nestmann) and are presented in these proceedings. According to the more informal character of the workshop, there was no formal refereeing process. It is expected that the abstracts presented in these proceedings will appear elsewhere at other conferences or in journals.
We would like to thank the organizers of ICALP '98 for helping us set up the SOAP workshop and BRICS for the publication of these proceedings
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