Using Visitor Patterns in Object-Oriented Action Semantics

Object-oriented action semantics is a semantic framework for the definition of programming languages. the framework incorporates some object-oriented concepts to the action semantics formalism. its main goal is to obtain more readable and reusable semantic specifications. objectoriented action semantics provides support for the definition of syntax-independent specifications, due to the way its classes are written. in a previous work, a library of classes (called lfl) was developed to improve specification reuse and to provide a way to describe semantic concepts, independent from the syntax of the programming language. this paper aims to address some problematic aspects of lfl, and presents a case study, where a specification is built by using the visitor pattern technique. the use of this pattern allows a clear separation between the syntax of a programming language and its different semantic aspects.