Prototyping A&A ReSpecT in Maude

The formal modelling of programming languages has always been a difficult activity due to the gap occurring between formal definition and actual implementation. On the other hand, the Maude rewriting language has already proven to be a suitable tool to bridge the gap between theory and practice when implementing the operational semantics of programming languages. In particular, Maude has been exploited to model languages belonging to different paradigms and levels of abstraction, leading to specifications that represent de facto executable prototypes of such languages.

In this paper we focus on A&A ReSpecT, a coordination language based on the agents and artifacts (A&A) meta-model, and exploit Maude to generate an execution machine for A&A ReSpecT programs, acting as an implementation of its operational semantics.