Abstract
This report is identical to an earlier version of May 1978 except that Chapter 5 has been revised. A new paper: "A Petri Net Definition of a System Description Language", DAIMI, April 1979, 20 pages, extends the Petri net model to include a data state representing the program variables.
Delta is a language designed for general system description. It is partly build upon Simula, but is more than a programming language, since it contains several features, which cannot be implemented on a computer system. E.g. a continuous time concept, concurrency between an unbounded number of components and the possibility of using predicates to specify state changes.
In this paper a formal semantics for Delta is defined and analysed using Petri nets.
Petri nets was chosen because the ideas behind Petri nets and Delta concide on several points.
A number of proposals for changes in Delta, which resulted from this work, are also reported here, whereas a number of different extensions to the Petri net formalism may be found in (DAIMI TR-5).
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Aarhus Universitetsforlag |
| Number of pages | 142 |
| Publication status | Published - 1979 |