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- [1] Department of Computer Science,
The University of Western Australia, Nedlands, Western Australia, 6009
- [2] Department of Computer Science,
Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia, 3168
Several working groups have been established to study and
standardize popular command interpreters. However, as with
the standardization of many programming languages, the syntaxes of
command interpreters have been rigorously defined in notation such as
Backus-Naur Form (BNF) but the semantic definitions remain
ambiguously defined in natural languages such as English.
This paper defines a significant subset of the standard UNIX
command interpreter, or shell, in terms of its
denotational semantics.
A complete implementation of this shell in Standard ML is described.
This implementation enables direct execution of the denotational semantics and
encourages experimentation with the semantic definition.
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