PLSS 2025 – Programming Language Standardization and Specification

Workshop on Programming Language Standardization and Specification

The evolution of widely adopted programming languages is critical for ensuring their sustainability, interoperability, and adaptability to changing technological and societal needs. This workshop aims to advance the understanding of programming language standardization and foster collaborative solutions for its challenges. Participants will have the opportunity to share insights, case studies, and best practices to shape the future of programming language specification and evolution.

The workshop will examine the role of specifications as the foundation for standards documents, focusing on a wide range of topics, such as:

• mechanized specifications of programming languages
• formal methods in programming language specifications
• decision making in programming language standardization
• integrating programming language standardization in CS education
• intellectual property rights issues in programming language standardization
• socio-technical aspects of programming language evolution
• implications for language adoption

Whether addressing historical perspectives, emerging trends, cross-disciplinary approaches, or novel methodologies, the workshop seeks to provide a platform for exploring diverse ideas.

Talks

Call for Presentations

The Workshop on Programming Language Standardization and Specification invites submissions for presentations that explore the specification and standardization of widely adopted programming languages.

We welcome contributions that address a wide range of topics related to programming language specification and standardization, including but not limited to:

• programming language specification formalisms
• formal methods in programming language specifications
• mechanised and executable specifications
• HCI in programming language standardization
• decision making in programming language standardization
• intellectual property rights issues and legal aspects in programming language standardization
• socio-technical aspects of programming language evolution and standardization
• implications of standardization for language adoption
• didactics of programming language specifications
• integrating programming language standardization in CS education
• “standardese” and linguistic aspects of programming language specification texts

Submission Guidelines

Prospective presenters should submit an abstract (300-500 words) outlining their proposed presentation. The abstract should clearly articulate the topic, key contributions, and relevance to the workshop themes. Submissions may include technical discussions, position statements, or experience reports. Submissions on work-in-progress are specifically encouraged. Previously presented or published work that is relevant to the workshop themes is also welcome.

Submissions will undergo a lightweight review process.

The keynote will be given by Dr. Andreas Rossberg, the author of the WebAssembly language specification and maintainer of the reference interpreter.

Engineering a Formal Language Specification

The official specification for WebAssembly includes an end-to-end formal semantics, and every new feature must be specified in this formal semantics, in prose, and in the official reference interpreter before it can be standardised. This manual process with its redundancies is laborious and error-prone. We present SpecTec, a DSL and toolchain that facilitates both the WebAssembly specification and the generation of artefacts necessary for standardisation. A definition of the WebAssembly semantics in SpecTec serves as a single source of truth, from which we can generate a typeset specification, including formal definitions and prose pseudocode descriptions, and a meta-level interpreter. Further backends for test generation and meta-theory in theorem provers are work in progress.