Peter David Mosses (born 1948) is a British computer scientist. Peter Mosses studied mathematics as an undergraduate at

Trinity College Trinity College may refer to: Australia * Trinity Anglican College, an Anglican coeducational primary and secondary school in , New South Wales * Trinity Catholic College, Auburn, a coeducational school in the inner-western suburbs of Sydney, New ...

Oxford Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

, and went on to undertake a

DPhil A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

supervised by

Christopher Strachey Christopher S. Strachey (; 16 November 1916 – 18 May 1975) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design and computer time-sharing.F. J. Corbató, et al. ...

in the Programming Research Group while at

Wolfson College, Oxford Wolfson College () is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. Located in north Oxford along the River Cherwell, Wolfson is an all-graduate college with around sixty governing body fellows, in addition to both research a ...

in the early 1970s. He was the last student to submit his thesis under Strachey before Strachey's death. In 1978, Mosses published his compiler-compiler, the Semantic Implementation System (SIS), which uses a denotational semantics description of the input language.Peter Mosses, "SIS: A Compiler-Generator System Using Denotational Semantics," Report 78-4-3, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark, June 1978 Mosses has spent most of his career at BRICS in

Denmark ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of Denmark , establish ...

. He returned to a chair at

Swansea University Swansea University ( cy, Prifysgol Abertawe) is a public university, public research university located in Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom. It was chartered as University College of Swansea in 1920, as the fourth college of the University of Wales. ...

Wales Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the Bristol Channel to the south. It had a population in ...

. His main contribution has been in the area of formal

program semantics In programming language theory, semantics is the rigorous mathematical study of the meaning of programming languages. Semantics assigns computational meaning to valid strings in a programming language syntax. Semantics describes the processes ...

. In particular, with David Watt he developed

action semantics Action semantics is a framework for the formal specification of semantics of programming languages invented by David Watt and Peter D. Mosses in the 1990s. It is a mixture of denotational, operational and algebraic semantics. Action Semantics ...

, a combination of denotational,

operational An operational definition specifies concrete, replicable procedures designed to represent a construct. In the words of American psychologist S.S. Stevens (1935), "An operation is the performance which we execute in order to make known a concept." F ...

and algebraic semantics. Currently, Mosses is a visitor at

TU Delft Delft University of Technology ( nl, Technische Universiteit Delft), also known as TU Delft, is the oldest and largest Dutch public technical university, located in Delft, Netherlands. As of 2022 it is ranked by QS World University Rankings among ...

, working with the Programming Languages Group.

References

External links

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* Living people Alumni of Trinity College, Oxford Alumni of Wolfson College, Oxford Members of the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford British computer scientists Academics of Swansea University Formal methods people 1948 births {{UK-compu-bio-stub