# Towards a Mathematical Operational Semantics

## Daniele Turi and Gordon Plotkin

### In Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, LICS '97, pages 280--291. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997.

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### Abstract

We describe operational rules abstractly as natural transformations of a type depending on functorial notions of syntax and behaviour. Every such natural transformation induces a distributive law between the syntax and the behaviour. The bialgebras of this distributive law are combinations of denotational and operational models which are always adequate' with respect to the original rules. In particular, the final bialgebra is fully-abstract with respect to the equivalence on operational models corresponding to the behaviour. The theory specialises to the known classes of well-behaved rules for structural operational semantics.

@InProceedings{TP97,
Author={Turi, D. and Plotkin, G.D.},
Title={Towards a mathematical operational semantics},
Organization={IEEE},
Publisher={Computer Society Press},
Booktitle={Proc.\ 12$^{\rm th}$ LICS Conf.},
Pages={280-291},
Year=1997,
source = {http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/dt/}
}
`

Daniele Turi