Section: New Results

Formal Techniques for General and Domain-Specific Languages

In 2012 we have finished the previous year's activities on domain-specific languages based on formal model-driven engineering with two papers [18] , [24] . Our conclusion is that formal MDE-based language definition is interesting because of its generality but adds extra layers of complexity due to the fact that language concepts and semantics are only formalised indirectly, through the formalisation of MDE concepts used in language definition. We have decided thus to move on towards more direct ways of defining and reasoning about languages. We have been experimenting with the K framework  (http://www.k-framework.org ) for formally defining both the assembly language and a higher-level language for programming on the upcoming dynamically reconfigurable hardware architecture that our team is developing.

We have also worked on proving the correctness of a compiler between high-level and assembly language, based on new symbolic program-equivalence proof techniques we are developping in collaboration with the K team [29] . We have also been working on generic symbolic execution techniques for programming languages having term-rewriting based semantics [28] (PhD of Andrei Arusoaie, supervised in collaboration with Prof. Dorel Lucanu from the K team of Univ. Iasi (Romania).