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Vienna Definition Language

The Vienna Definition Language (VDL) is a formal language used for specifying the semantics of programming languages.

It was developed in the IBM Vienna Lab in the 1960s, and exerted significant influence on formal methods, especially in the UK Jones and Thomas 2022.

The VDL allowed users to specify the syntax of a language, and then define its semantics in an operational style.

Work on the VDL led to its successor, the Vienna Development Method, which had a more denotational flavour.

See also

References

Peter Wegner. 2003. Vienna definition language. Encyclopedia of Computer Science. John Wiley and Sons Ltd., GBR, 1831–1832. 
@inbook{10.5555/1074100.1074902,
	author = {Wegner, Peter},
	title = {Vienna Definition Language},
	year = {2003},
	isbn = {0470864125},
	publisher = {John Wiley and Sons Ltd.},
  booktitle = {Encyclopedia of Computer Science},
	pages = {1831–1832},
	numpages = {2}
}
Peter Lucas and Kurt Walk. On the formal description of PL/I. Annual Review in Automatic Programming, 6:105–182, 1969. https://doi.org/10.1016/0066-4138(69)90005-6 Cliff B. Jones and Martyn Thomas. 2022. The Development and Deployment of Formal Methods in the UK. Form. Asp. Comput. 34, 1, Article 6 (March 2022), 21 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3522577 arXiv 
@article{10.1145/3522577,
	author = {Jones, Cliff B. and Thomas, Martyn},
	title = {The Development and Deployment of Formal Methods in the UK},
	year = {2022},
	publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
	address = {New York, NY, USA},
	volume = {34},
	number = {1},
	issn = {0934-5043},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3522577},
	doi = {10.1145/3522577},
	journal = {Formal Aspects of Computing},
	articleno = {6},
	numpages = {21},
}