Semantics for a Real-Time Object-Oriented Programming Language

This paper presents a framework to define a semantics for a real-time object-orientation programming language and to verify programs written in the language. The semantics is defined as the collection of translation rules that map the syntactic constructions of the language into expressions in a process calculus extended with the notion of time. By using the expressive capabilities of the calculus, the semantics can appropriately capture temporal features of the language such as timeout exception and execution time, and concurrent object-oriented features such as concurrency, class, and object creation. Particularly, since it can restrict the number of concurrent activities which take place simultaneously, it allows to analyze and predict temporal and behavioral properties of programs executed even with a number of processors smaller than the number of active objects. Through an example, we illustrate a method of analyzing real-time programs.