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2023INF023
Doctoral thesis

Sound notional machines : a foundation and its applications

  • 2023

PhD: Università della Svizzera italiana

Notional machines
Programming education
Computer science education
Programming languages
Language semantics
Equational reasoning
Bisimulation
Types
Haskell
Java
English A notional machine is a pedagogic device that abstracts away details of the semantics of a programming language to focus on some aspects of interest. A notional machine should be sound: it should be consistent with the corresponding programming language, and it should be a proper abstraction. Notional machines found in the computer science education literature are usually not evaluated with respect to their soundness. To address this problem, we first introduce a formal definition of soundness for notional machines. The definition is based on the construction of a commutative diagram that relates the notional machine and the aspect of the programming language the notional machine is focused on. Leveraging this formalism, we present a methodology for constructing sound notional machines and a similar methodology to reveal potential inconsistencies in existing notional machines. We apply these methodologies to build sound-by-construction notional machines and find inconsistencies in existing ones as well as propose solutions to these inconsistencies. Finally, we show that the same commutative diagram that describes a notional machine can be used also to design experiments to evaluate that notional machine as an educational assessment instrument.
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Language
  • English
Classification
Computer science and technology
License
License undefined
Open access status
green
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1328768
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