@TechReport{Kahl-2003a,
  author = 	 {Wolfram Kahl},
  title = 	 {Compositional Syntax and Semantics of Tables},
  institution =  {Software Quality Research Laboratory,
                  Department of Computing and Software,
                  McMaster University},
  year = 	 {2003},
  type = 	 {SQRL Report},
  number = 	 {15},
  month = 	 OCT,
  note = {available from\\
          \textsf{http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/sqrl/sqrl\_reports.html}},
  abstract = {Parnas together with a number of colleagues
     established the systematic use of certain kinds of tables as a
     useful tool in software documentation and inspection with an
     accessible, multi-dimensional syntax and intuitive semantics.

     Previous approaches to formalisation of table semantics based
     their definitions on the multi-dimensional array structure of
     tables and thus achieved close correspondence with the intuitive
     understanding of tables.

     In this paper, we argue that a different view, supporting a
     compositional semantics, is more advantageous for tool support
     and for reasoning about tables. For this purpose, we also need a
     compositional table syntax, and we perform an analysis of table
     syntax that leads us to a particular compositional view of table
     structure.

     This simple, inductive view of the structure of tables allows us
     to provide highly flexible tools for defining the semantics of
     tabular expressions. The straight-forward compositional
     formalisation of table semantics on the one hand yields very
     general table transformation theorems and enables us to perform
     fully formal proofs for these theorems in a mechanised theorem
     prover, and on the other hand also may serve as basis for the
     implementation of semantics-aware table support tools.}
}